Reform or Revolution                                     Index

I'm for reforming our churches, our laws, our national character, our image abroad, our trade practices, our immigration policy, our public education, our welfare system, our health care system--Everything!  But I'm for reform, not revolution.

Remember the campus radicals of the late sixties?  They wanted revolution. They wanted to pull down all our institutions and build an earthly paradise on the Marxist model. They really believed, I think, that if they destroyed all corrupt or imperfect institutions, a perfect utopian world would rise spontaneously out of the rubble. Yes, it was absurd! But it was that imbecile vision, along with their gargantuan egos,  that drove those misguided lads and lasses.

The main difference between a young, radical idealist and an older, conservative realist is in the way they would go about changing things.  The older, sadder, and wiser man has learned that the best way to bring about change is through the existing institutions. He has come to respect the collective wisdom that produced, through slow evolution, the present institutions. The conservative is  no more content with  the status quo than he should be. He merely wants to preserve what is good while he reforms what is bad.  The revolutionary can find nothing about his country that he loves enough to reform, nothing worth saving. The conservative loves his country too much to destroy her in order to make her better. The radical revolutionary is like a mad physician whose only remedy for all ills is to kill the patient.

Let's take health care reform for instance.  No conservative that I know is content with the present system. Everyone sees the need to correct some serious flaws in it.  But we conservatives also recognize  that much of what is wrong with the system is a result of government intrusion; and we can't for the life of us see how more government intrusion is going to fix it. Our health care system is by all accounts the best in the world.  And we can't point to any case in which the introduction of bureaucracy on a massive scale has made anything better, ever.

So, let us keep the present system intact, change what needs changing, and keep the government out of it as much as possible. Someone once said: "Reform is a correction of abuses; revolution is a transfer of power." Though they call it welfare reform, I'm afraid what the Clintons and their cronies want is not reform, but a takeover of health care by government.  Maybe Mr. Clinton, himself a former campus radical, still dreams of a brave new world of socialism.