Wrong.

I don't know if you need a paid registration to the WSJ to read this article by Gerald Seib, but when I read it in the print version this morning (I always read the WSJ Saturday edition on Sunday) I came away with two thoughts:

1) In general, Mr. Seib wrote a thoughtful essay about what's wrong with our government, and

2) In particular, Mr. Seib muffed his recommendations on how to fix that.

His first mistake is to start the column off by trying to make Harry Reid look sympathetic.  Harry Reid thinks it is crazy that Congress has a favorable poll rating of only 10%.  Harry Reid is blind and deaf (or willfully ignoring anything happening outside the Beltway) if he can't figure out why that is.

He (Seib) then spends some time examining how we have come to this pass, and I'm not going to criticize his conclusions about history, other than to say that you can't compress forty years of growing popular mistrust of goverment into a short column and expect to do more than gloss over the high points.  But in general, he's got most of not all of the high points of government distrust enumerated.

Then he draws the exact wrong conclusions from what he's just said.

First, he says we need to manage the deficit.  Wrong.  We need to GET RID of the deficit entirely and start spending within our means.  Deficit spending is for wartime.  The wars on drugs, poverty, and dead white males don't count.

Next he says (echoing the President's recent remarks), "Government has to work better, meaning that it needs to modernize and become more useful in our everyday lives."

Look, most of us don't want government in our lives at all. Government DOES NOT need to work "better" and "modernize" and become "more useful" in our everyday lives.   Folks who think that probably voted for 0bama and are living on government handouts.  No true American believes that government is the solution to anything, except maybe a solution to not having enough blue-water naval ships and enough tanks and planes and guns and bombs (which is actually an enumerated purpose of the American government under the Constitution, more that can be said about most other things our current government does).  Oh look, and Mr. Seib even quoted Ronaldus Magnus to that effect.  Too bad he didn't take anything away from that quote.

Then he says the political system has to be fixed. But here's how:  "States need to stop drawing congressional districts that ensure deep and paralyzing polarization by making them so dark red or dark blue that only the most ideologically rigid candidates bother to run."  Say what?  How many "ideologically rigid" congresscritters do we actually have?  Hell, if you could say that of the Republican majority in the House, we'd never have to worry about anything like a stupid immigration bill or inaction on repealing 0bamacare. Most of the problem with congressional Republicans is that they are anything but ideologically rigid.

Finally he says an economic boom would help.  Well, Mr. Seib, none of the ideas you've expressed in your articles are compatible with an economic boom.

And I can't help but notice that nowhere in his article did Mr. Seib point out that the burgeoning, unaccountable bureaucracy that has been put into place since Woodrow Wilson started and Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson mostly completed the socialization of what was once the greatest democratic republic in the world.

Back to square one.  Wasted my time reading that article.