On the Record | For a Full Brexit, Get Government Out of the Way

Please see my February 4^th wire as Brexit diarist for The New York Sun, ‘For a Full Brexit, Get Government Out of the Way ’:

The early 1920s epitomized economic growth and employment opportunity. Good things in themselves, but especially so when “progressive” thinking at the end of the Great War argued that if nations wound down their “warfare-state” programs of government interventions, price controls, and deficit spending, a period of massive unemployment would ensue as soldiers returned from the front and public expenditures shrank.

Anything but happened, especially in America, where the laissez-faire Warren G. Harding replaced the Big State of Woodrow Wilson. One reaction of this was to put the lie to the statist sympathies of one Herbert Croly. An early progressive, Croly, later a founder of “The New Republic,” was the author in 1906 of “The Promise of American Life.” One of its prescriptions was to marry the power of the state to realize human fulfillment.

Or the idea of using “Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends.” Only disciples of the strong central government ideas of Alexander Hamilton could cheer this prospect. Who can deny the benefits of meeting your full potential? Yet the means to achieve it were antithetical to limited-government Jeffersonians: redistributive taxes, social welfare programs, and the requisite “big state” to make it all happen.

Now comes Britain’s exit from the European Union. It holds out the promise of something different, or something that hasn’t been tried in recent years. Its promise is independence. Ostensibly, the objective is for the United Kingdom to exit the European Union. That, though, is but the beginning. The promise goes, and will need to go, beyond simply leaving one arena of over-government. Don’t Britons deserve a “full Brexit”?

“Hell, yeah!” Brexiteers will proclaim. And Boris Johnson, iconoclast, bon vivant, and Brexit cheerleader-in-chief, is just the man to do it. He can adapt Croly’s phraseology to fit the new Brexit paradigm. He can “make Britain great again,” not by using the levers of State power but by lifting the dead hand of government from the economy and unleashing human potential.

Read more . . .

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My thanks to editor Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun.