President Obama’s former Office of Management and Budget director, and current Vice Chairman of Global Banking at Citigroup, Peter Orszag has a column up at The New Republic titled, “Too Much of a Good Thing, Why we need less democracy.” Orszag writes:
Orszag goes on to make the case for government-by-expert-commission, decrying the rise of polarization, which he claims “is making it increasingly difficult for lawmakers to tackle the issues that are central to our country’s future.” Orszag then gets specific, asserting that “virtually all responsible economists agree” that we need more deficit spending now and plans for deficit reduction sometime in the unspecified future. Orszag then blames polarized politics for the failure of Congress to enact policy along these lines. “What we need, then, are ways around our politicians,” Orszag concludes.
What Orszag conveniently leaves out of this analysis is that the vast majority of the American people don’t want higher deficit spending now. That, and the fact that there are hundreds of responsible economists who don’t believe massive government spending is needed to stimulate the economy.
The reality is that liberals’ desire to bypass democracy is as old as the progressive movement itself. In 1891, Woodrow Wilson, the founder of the progressive movement wrote:
Hillsdale Associate Professor of Political Science Ronald Pestritto recounts:
…
Wilson’s model for this conception of administrators, he freely acknowledged, was almost entirely foreign to American constitutionalism. Yet it was his own notion of the distinction between politics and administration, Wilson argued, that cleared the way for importing what was essentially a Prussian model of administration into the United States.
