Short-Term Consequences of Long-Term Policies – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

This is part five of a five-part series. Read the first four parts here.

The government is a failed company. It works poorly even when it works well. Since we can’t get rid of it, the only solution left is to make it small enough that its messes don’t have a big impact. Democracy, after all, is the best of the worst ways to have a government. If corporate decisions were as democratic as politics pretends to be, if as many unqualified people were involved in those decisions as are involved in choosing the government, the only profitable businesses would be funeral homes and corporate liquidation firms. In the end, as H. L. Mencken wrote years ago, “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know, has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

“Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish,” said Lao Tzu, and I can think of three recipes: steamed, fried, or soup. The formula is already in use, and the results aren’t what we hoped for. Politicians dream of spending their days steaming in some luxury sauna, the multiculturalist soup of immigration policies stinks, and the middle classes are fried — more like charred — burned to a crisp by tax pressure and confiscatory obsession.

Lenin also believed government had something to do with the kitchen. He started by saying, “Every cook has to learn how to govern the state,” and ended with his signature dish, the Red Terror, in which he was the chef with a one-course meal of hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens baked in his disgusting revolution.

Another famous chef at the helm of a great nation was Barack Obama, a colossal fraud. His favorite recipe was chili, learned from his mother. When he got into government, he said, “There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America.” Everyone thought it was an observation, but no, it was a lament. To fix it, he quickly cooked up a radical chili recipe of division to ensure there’d no longer be a United States of America.

Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, wasn’t a cook but an actor, yet he understood the true recipe for good government better than all the others: “Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.”

Over these past few weeks, I’ve been laying out a plan of conservative policies for the long term across various areas. A plan that, if executed by the government, would — for the first time in many years — leave our children and grandchildren a better world than the one we’re enjoying (and “enjoying” is an intentionally ironic verb here).

We’ve been talking about recipes, but a serious nutritionist (and I’m willing to be one) must first consider the patient’s health before designing a meal plan. And the government, in this case, suffers from morbid obesity. My recipes for good government would start by putting the massive federal apparatus on a diet until its weight resembles Gigi Hadid more than Tess Holliday.

This recipe isn’t just for economic policies, where the need to cut spending, bureaucracy, and taxes is obvious, but also for education, where there’s pounds of indoctrination to shed; for immigration policy, where we need to lose the excess of illegal immigrants, mafias, and criminals; or for energy policy, where we should stop ordering junk energy from the couch and get moving to cook up a healthy plate of sovereignty.

The problem with these recipes is that, while they’re beneficial in the long term, they come with painful short-term consequences. Politics, infected by the rest of society, has become addicted to immediacy. Voters demand that a new president radically change things in a week, expecting to see results in their bank accounts by then. The Argentine miracle shows that smart policy can change things pretty quickly, but we have to realize that the chainsaw first prunes, then allows the tree to grow healthy and beautiful. It’s a process.

Are our politicians willing to tank their popularity to leave a better world tomorrow? I believe — and I could be wrong — that Donald Trump is. Many of the measures he’s taken point in that direction, regardless of the immediate fallout. Still, I wish those measures came with a pedagogical explanation of the why and the what-for.

Across the West, citizens are fed up with government politicians never delivering bad news. A company whose executives never tell their employees “something’s wrong” or “we need adjustments” is a company headed for bankruptcy. Any government wanting to implement conservative policies for the long term should, for once, sit down with its citizens, be reasonably honest, and explain the roadmap ahead. Without comparing Argentina’s situation to the U.S., it’s worth noting that Javier Milei was brutally honest right after taking power: “There’s no money,” he said, before assuring people he had a plan to fix things. He told the truth, even though it was awful. And Argentinians accepted it. And Argentina is building a better future for the next generations.

The United States, and all of the West that’s turning toward conservatism, will regret it if they miss this unique chance to dream big and work for tomorrow.

Read the rest of this series:

Why Conservatives Need a Long-Range Vision

A Strong Economy Needs a Strong Demography

The Future Left the Group: Education, Culture, and Values

National Security and the Global Landscape