It has been 35 years since Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural speech as president—the one in which he said, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Over that time, hostility toward government seems only to have grown, led by politicians and embraced by millions of Americans. In this most recent presidential campaign, Republican candidates outdid one another in calling to abolish the agencies they were running to lead, including the IRS, the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Department of Energy.
I find all this troubling. Not because I think those agencies—or the government as a whole—are faultless, but because I don’t see how a democratic society and market economy can function without an effective government. Capitalism and a representative democracy may need to function separately for this nation to be strong, prosperous, and free, but they also need to work together.
