On January 20th, 2017 Donald J. Trump will take the oath of office as the 45th president of the United States. He campaigned under the slogan: Make America Great Again. There are two ways to try to achieve this vision.
The first way is the one progressives from both parties have been using since the beginning of the twentieth century which is to create government programs and spend printed money to achieve different goals. This way doesn’t work and is against everything any conservative or libertarian would consider right. This way is what gave us the bloated bureaucracies in agencies such as the FDA, EPA, and IRS. This way is what gave us 20 Trillion dollars in debt and Trillions more of unfunded liabilities in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The constitution prescribes certain powers for congress and the president should be only executing the laws congress passes in those areas, everything else is the violation of the constitution facilitated by the supreme court. We have been creating agencies and programs for over a century and none of them worked or will ever work.
The second way is to scale back government to its proper size and leave the people free to run their own lives. To make America great again using this way means to focus on repealing laws and dismantling programs. I understand that Democrats and some Republicans are invested in many of these programs and will defend them fiercely to save their seats but I hope that the conservative Republicans in congress fight the war intelligently and work effectively with President Trump to scale back government.
Donald Trump didn’t stress that he is a limited government advocate during the campaign but I hope that his experience as a businessman makes him close to the limited government vision. Conservatives should help him reach the conclusion that the problem is not that government is doing a bad job because of bad personnel or leadership but because government regulation of the economy doesn’t work. I am sure he had many bad experiences with government and he brags about his business’s ability to finish projects that the government failed to finish so he may be close to that conclusion.
Cutting taxes and regulations is good but can be forestalled by the democrats and their allies in the federal bureaucracy that’s why it is important to go after the different agencies and try to eliminate or scale them back. Passing bills to eliminate or cut agencies may be hard but I hope that conservative republicans can make some use of the appropriation bills, which cannot be filibustered, and vulnerable Democrats from conservative states to achieve some of the cuts.
2017 brings a golden opportunity to the Republicans to show whether they are limited government conservatives as they claim or just a light version of the Democratic party.