Here’s a non-exhaustive snapshot of the kind of America I’d like to see. I want to live in a country where most people don’t think very much about the federal government or national politics. To the extent the federal government is involved in our daily lives, I’d like it to reject metaphors about it being our mother, father, or nanny. In fact, I’d prefer if people didn’t look at the federal government metaphorically at all. But if they had to, maybe think of it as your neighbor. It’ll chip in to help in a dire circumstance or emergency, but its generosity and patience are not inexhaustible, at least not for people who can help themselves. But oldsters, shut-ins, the disabled. Maybe neighbors agree on a plan to help on a more permanent basis.
I want to see a broadly tolerant country where minority rights are protected. I also want a country where majority values are respected. The only way to have that kind of country, by the way, is to have more federalism–under which national minorities can live as local majorities. I want America to remain the strongest country in the world and the leader of the free portions of it. And I’d like us to do what we can, where prudent, to see the free world expand. I want government, at every level, to recognize that spending and borrowing have natural limits.
That’s probably enough on government. One helpful heuristic: Ask yourself “What would Mitch Daniels do?” and whatever the answer is you can be pretty sure I’ll say, “That. I want that.”
He used to be way too metrocon for my tastes, but our paths have been drifting closer to each other since, oh, about here.
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