The Collective Turn. By David Brooks. New York Times, January 21, 2013.
Brooks:
I also
think Obama misunderstands this moment. The Progressive Era, New Deal and Great
Society laws were enacted when America was still a young and growing nation.
They were enacted in a nation that was vibrant, raw, underinstitutionalized and
needed taming.
We are
no longer that nation. We are now a mature nation with an aging population. Far
from being underinstitutionalized, we are bogged down with a bloated political
system, a tangled tax code, a byzantine legal code and a crushing debt.
The
task of reinvigorating a mature nation is fundamentally different than the task
of civilizing a young and boisterous one. It does require some collective
action: investing in human capital. But, in other areas, it also involves
stripping away — streamlining the special interest sinecures that have built up
over the years and liberating private daring.
Reinvigorating
a mature nation means using government to give people the tools to compete, but
then opening up a wide field so they do so raucously and creatively. It means
spending more here but deregulating more there. It means facing the fact that
we do have to choose between the current benefits to seniors and investments in
our future, and that to pretend we don’t face that choice, as Obama did, is effectively
to sacrifice the future to the past.
