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December 10th, 2010 7:03 pm
Policy Entrepreneurs

For those CFIF readers looking for intellectually stimulating Christmastime reading, I heartily recommend Walter Russell Mead’s extended blog post titled “The Crisis of the American Intellectual.”  Picking up and expanding on Alan Bloom’s thesis in “Closing of the American Mind,” Mead issues a frontal attack on our nation’s intellectual elites, a group Mead faults as failing to adapt to a changing world.  Himself a Democrat, Mead argues that intellectuals – the best credentialed, most influentially placed people in our society – across the political spectrum owe it to the people and causes they champion to get serious about constructing a workable, sustainable government.  Here is a too brief sample:

Right now, too many intellectuals try to turn this into a left/right debate rather than one about the past and the future.  There is a liberal case for the radical overhaul of our knowledge industries as well as a Tea Party one.  People who want to extend government protections to more groups need to be thinking how government can be radically restructured so it can be more effective at a lower cost.  People who want more education to be available for the poor need to think about deep reform in primary and secondary education, and they need to think up ways to reduce the spiraling costs of university education.  Those who like the public services provided in troubled blue states like New York, Illinois and California need to redesign state government and find alternatives to the tenured civil service bureaucracies built one hundred years ago.  Those who want more access and more equal access to education, to legal services and to medical care need to think about how we can use technology to radically restructure the way we organize and deliver these services — and the more you care about the poor the less you can care about the protests of the guilds.

Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) is challenging the public education guild (i.e. teachers unions).  Governor Mitch Daniels (R-IN) challenged the bureaucratic leviathan and won key reforms.  Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is challenging the unsustainable structure of the Great Society.  Ryan once worked for Jack Kemp as a speech writer during the latter’s stint as Bob Dole’s vice presidential running mate.  Kemp challenged liberal statists and libertarian anarchists with his vision of an “Opportunity Society,” an approach to government policy that injected economic opportunity down into the roots of the welfare state.

The debate about government spending will dominate our politics for the foreseeable future.  Hopefully, policy entrepreneurs like Christie, Daniels, and Ryan will gain the attention – and the success – their ideas deserve.

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