Recommended: The System Works

Charles Krauthammer has a thought-provoking piece today in the National Review Online site: The System Works. While the talking heads all bemoan how dysfunctional the government seems to be, he argues it is working just the way a democracy should work. Yes, it is noisy and messy and slow, but, he argues, the creators of our government system meant it to be slow to change, so that it wouldn't be constantly buffeted by the fads of the day.

He views the issue from a right-wing perspective, of course, but nonetheless I think he has a valid point. Beginning to attack the debt and deficit problem in the debt ceiling debate was driven, not by an extremist few, as the liberals keep claiming, but by a widespread consensus in the nation that we are too much in debt. But, as he points out, the Republicans shouldn't have won a massive cut in that negotiation, because the nation hasn't yet entrusted them with the whole Congress.

Massive change in our government policies, he argues, SHOULD be slow and subject to intense national debate. So when the Obama administration sought to make a massive change in ObamaCare, it SHOULD have been debated loudly and widely, and it was and still is. Messy, yes, but far better than an autocratic imposition of change without debate.