Mitt Romney: Just Another Statist

Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Republican politicians like Rick Santorum have gone on the warpath against John McCain and, while it’s nice to see the Senator from Arizona getting his ox gored, the idea that Mitt Romney is a conservative in any sense of the word is, as Cato’s Michael Tanner notes, simply absurd:

[O]ne would expect a conservative to be opposed to government-run health care. But, as governor, Romney signed—and still says he supports—a health care plan virtually indistinguishable from the one put forward by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Romney’s plan, like the Democratic plans, includes an individual mandate, heavy insurance regulation, middle class subsidies, and a bureaucratic new pooling mechanism. Like the Democrats, Romney believes that goal of health policy should be “universal coverage.” So far, his plan has not only failed in that regard, but it has limited consumer choice, cut reimbursements to providers, driven up insurance premiums, and run deficits of $150-$400 million.

And, one would expect the putative conservative alternative to want to cut government spending. But Mitt Romney has called for spending an additional $20 billion in corporate welfare to bail out the auto industry. He wants to increase farm price supports. He supports George Bush’s Medicare prescription drug benefit and calls for more federal education spending. Indeed, he wants the federal government to buy a laptop computer for every school child in America. Like George W. Bush running in 2000, Romney has not called for cutting or eliminating a single government program—and we know what that meant for a Bush presidency.

And yet this is the man that people who consider themselves the heirs of Ronald Reagan are supporting.