Meet the Press’s Thoughts, Today

Last night, on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart (10-08-09),  the host of the nation’s top news show made a seemingly run of the mill statement, that is anything but. Unfortunately, it’s an all too common one on the part of partisan politicians.  And as asserted by host David Gregory, it illustrates how the level of thought being expressed at the top levels of our media is often helping to further misinform our national debate — when it is supposed to be doing the exact opposite.  

Here is how the conversation went:

Jon Stewart:  How has it changed in the last eight months. I mean, really, in the eight years that preceeded that, were very similar. I mean, these bailouts were begun under the Bush Administration, he had a huge Medicare program, 1.3 [trillion dollars], it seems like when they say we want limited government, it means we want government limited to the guy that we want. 

David Gregory:  The president, this president, has expanded government, we know that; some of it was inherited. But he’s got to go out there and say “government  is the solution.”  He doesn’t have any choice now, he’s [unintelligible] as big government change, and have that fight with Republicans, who are going to say, ‘no, government is the enemy, government can’t get this done.  That is the fight that needs to be had.

Is “big government change” really Obama’s motif, or did Gregory, as a matter of declarative fact, just spin this the way Obama’s opponents have?

But more importantly, Americans won’t get it through their heads that “the government”  is us — with the only pertinent questions being “in a free and independent country, what do we have to sensibly try to address collectively, and how do we do that” – if the media won’t get it either. 

In the interview, Gregory also stated: 

We have an obligation to talk about what’s fact, what’s fiction, what’s real.

The ideas of “government” being the “solution,” or “the enemy” are abstractions that when applied as a generality to the real world (as Gregory just did), are fictional. Yet Gregory repeated this fiction, and helped propagate the misunderstanding that contributes to it.

If government is the enemy, we should have none, and thus have anarchy. If government is the solution, we should – probably far worse than anarchy – have communism.  Both are preposterous, or simply scary. ( The latter is probably more so than the former, and our system of democracy, which essentially lets people live their lives while coming together to do the things that we can’t do individually, essentially realizes that.) 

Also note that one of the biggest complaints that some of those who are “against” ostensible “big government” have is on matters relating to the environment.  Yet the environment, along with national defense, is one of the two things that on a practical level, we have to share. And it presents a series of issues, for reasons that have been documented in thousands of papers going back to the original “Tragedy of the Commons,” that can not –without some oversight — be sensibly addressed only by a purely economc system where billions can literally be made and sheltered before far too late, after the fact, and often just theoretical, liability even attaches. (The third natural area for government is not one which we have to collectively share, but one which by its definition increases liberty, rather than impinges upon it, and that is justice). 

To the extent Gregory’s sweeping statement is referring to specific issues – although he is clearly playing to a broader “debate” notion about the role of government — the same reasoning applies.  The argument against government involvement with respect to any particular issue, is that this impinges upon liberty, is inefficient, leads to excessive bureaucracy (and so forth and so on), not that “government is the enemy.”  Al-Qaeda is the enemy. Calling our “government” the enemy, even as a term of art, and playing into the debate being framed in such misleading fashion, only furthers the current high level of misinformation and confusion. It also furthers a lack of grounding in the actual facts which Gregory himself ironically points out that the media has an obligation to share. It’s true that underlying notions of distrust (or trust) of government involvement play a role, but they are necessarily subsumed in the broader reasons why. This idea of “government” being the enemy (or the solution) spins this on its head.

There are countless easy examples. Let’s take a difficult one:  One where some of the consensus, at least, seems to be, incorrectly, that the only issue is whether or not to have “more government.” Namely, health care: 

Putting aside Social Security, our government currently spends more on health care than anything apart from national defense. And it now imposes an amazingly complex and burdensome system of rules, regulations, and almost comically high paperwork requirements. (Yet neither you nor I, preposterously, can simply walk into a laboratory to get our cholesterol levels checked, thanks to “government” protecting us from our ignorances:  which Party promulgated that series of rules that makes health care costs stratospheric, while impinging upon individual liberty in an otherwise almost unheard of manner?)  We could have health care reform that lowered government involvement, and/or lowered cost.  But if government was going to be more “involved” in something specifcally, shouldn’t it be in seeing that underprivileged American children have proper access to competent health care? 

Yet how does a country have this kind of discussion, when it is instead framed in the ridiculous terms of government being the “solution,” or the “enemy”?  The answer is, we can’t. 

And we have not, this decade, on almost any issue, thus far.  Even ideological debate cannot have much meaning when the basic underlying facts defining the debate’s parameters are not known or are constantly miss-expressed, and the debate itself is repeatedly being stated in ridiculously skewed, and highly misleading, if not quite backwards, terms. Terms that the host of the country’s leading news show just played right into, and applied himself.