Farhad Manjoo, New York Times tech columnist turned proudly left-wing opinion columnist, positively gloated over the private sector and Trump’s alleged failure to bring the coronavirus to heel in “Bring Back Big Government -- America’s failed response to the coronavirus is a direct result of decades of starving federal agencies of expertise.”
To make his case, Manjoo skipped the truth that one pattern of the government’s response is waiving regulations to avoid bureaucratic bottlenecks that stand in the way of hospital space, testing, and vaccine research.
Ten or 20 years from now, by the time the current crisis has hardened into a cautionary tale about the dangers of governmental incompetence, I imagine we’ll look back on Donald Trump’s Rose Garden news conference of Friday, March 13, as the moment that finally shattered the world’s faith in America....
Manjoo admired how China, an authoritarian Communist regime, handled things, while ignoring China's responsibillity, both in the origin of the virus and how its crushing of medical warnings launched the global crisis in the first place.
Would he commit the federal government to building hospitals to treat the masses sickened by the virus, the way China did?....
For Manjoo, no progress counts unless it comes courtesy of a top-down program from D.C. Of course, it’s all Reagan’s fault, though Manjoo is so far left even Clinton and Obama come in for some blame as insufficiently enamored of the national powers they had at hand.
This is a national shame, but not a surprise. The incompetence we see now is by design. Over the last 40 years, America has been deliberately stripped of governmental expertise. This is what happens when you starve the beast. This is what happens when you shrink government down to the size that you can drown it in a bathtub....
Much of this project, of course, originated on the political right. It was Ronald Reagan who quipped that the most terrifying words in the English language were “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” A parade of Republican-led Congresses sought to shrink federal budgets and stymie federal power.
Then, as Michael Lewis documented in “The Fifth Risk,” Trump came to power and began to take a sledgehammer to the government’s core functions. His administration gutted some services deliberately -- among them the National Security Council’s pandemic-response team...
The above is a lie. As National Security Council official Tim Morrison argued, the Trump administration consolidated three directorates: “It is this reorganization that critics have misconstrued or intentionally misrepresented.”
Manjoo knelt in reverence to federal power, confident enough to reverse Reagan’s joke:
The coronavirus crisis should be our wake-up call. The brands can’t help us. The brands won’t help us. The most comforting words I can think of now, amid so much uncertainty, chaos and confusion, are these: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
The column dissolves into a nest of contradiction: The federal government is incompetent, so give it more power over our lives?
