Implicit in much of what we cover in class is an argument over what government should and shouldn't do. Where should the line be drawn between the public and the private sector, and should that line be clear or blurry?
Even though liberals are argued to defend the use of government to promote goals and objectives the private sector cannot - or cares not to - address, they don't do a good job of it, at least according to Dionne who takes then to task for not doing so:
The case for government’s role in our country’s growth and financial
success goes back to the very beginning. One of the reasons I wrote my book “Our Divided Political Heart”
was to show that, from Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay forward,
farsighted American leaders understood that action by the federal
government was essential to ensuring the country’s prosperity,
developing our economy, promoting the arts and sciences and building
large projects: the roads and canals, and later, under Abraham Lincoln,
the institutions of higher learning, that bound a growing nation
together.
Both Clay and Lincoln battled those who used states’
rights slogans to crimp federal authority and who tried to use the
Constitution to handcuff anyone who would use the federal government
creatively. Both read the Constitution’s commerce clause as Franklin
Roosevelt and progressives who followed him did, as permitting federal
action to serve the common good. A belief in government’s constructive
capacities is not some recent ultra-liberal invention.
Liberals, he argues, have been brow beaten into baking off an aggressive defense of governmental involvement in various aspects of life. The national conversation about how to best govern ourselves is lesser as a result.
