Michael R. Wigley: Witness the conscience of a liberal: It ain't pretty

Lori Sturdevant's Nov. 11 column, "Legislative session could be idea-rich, cash-poor," so accurately reflects the liberal point of view that I highly recommend it to every Minnesotan. To paraphrase a reflection on the works of Karl Marx, "A liberal is a person who has read Lori Sturdevant's column; a conservative is a person who has read Lori Sturdevant's column and understands it."

Sturdevant unwittingly defines a fundamental liberal problem in her first paragraph:

"Reform of big, Byzantine public systems is cyclical work. It generally takes years of hand-wringing, analyzing and politicking to build a head of steam for noticeable change."

That should be a comforting thought to parents, especially in Minneapolis and St. Paul, sending their first-grader off to the big, Byzantine public school system. While legislators and bureaucrats are hand-wringing, analyzing and politicking, children are not learning to read or write or do arithmetic, but perhaps by the time the children are in the sixth grade ...

And as Sturdevant correctly implies, public education has a systemic problem. So "reform" would mean changing the system, right?

Well, no.

DFLer Mindy Greiling of Roseville wants to simply tweak the funding formula and add a billion dollars a year to the budget. In other words, the problem is not that children are not being educated; the problem is that the system is being challenged and needs to be supported better.

That Sturdevant's and Greiling's liberal solution is more money is not a surprise. What is somewhat shocking is how boldly Sturdevant states the liberal vision. Yes, we need more money, she states, and ...

"We'd love it from the feds ... . But when public work needs money, Minnesotans are acculturated to look first to state government."

Those are an ideologically rich couple of sentences.

First, Sturdevant exposes the liberal blind spot on federal vs. state money. All federal and state money comes from taxpayers. It is all diminished by the amount of government administration involved in collecting, requesting, approving and redistributing it. It all represents lost opportunity cost. Government money isn't free. The cost to society is all the things that would have been purchased and built and all the charitable organizations that would have benefited had the tax money remained in private hands.

The second implication of Sturdevant's comment, and perhaps the more frightening, is that she sees Minnesotans as a people who when faced with a problem "look first to state government" for a solution. Have Minnesotans become so domesticated by years of liberal hand-feeding that we are neither outraged nor embarrassed by the characterization of us as waiting placidly in the corner by our dish for a helping from the government gravy train?

After lamenting how letting people keep more of what they earn makes it "a lot more difficult for the state to get its hands on ... the incomes at the very top," Sturdevant employs an obvious bit of pop psychology, attempting to seduce Gov. Tim Pawlenty into changing the foreign corporation tax rules and generating about $125 million per year for the state by calling it "the closing of an unintended tax law loophole," not a new tax.

Changing the rule would be a tax increase because the rule is not an oversight. It was a conscious decision by the Legislature, including the DFL, to head off an exodus of businesses from Minnesota to more tax-friendly states.

Sturdevant reveals a final point about the liberal modus operandi when she writes that the governor can keep reform hopes alive if "he's willing close some loopholes, raise some fees, or otherwise 'enhance revenue' for reform's sake. If he makes common cause with reform-minded DFLers, he might even get them to refrain from spelling his ideas t-a-x."

In other words, the truth doesn't matter; the end justifies the means, and if state leaders have to fool taxpayers and pick their pockets to implement the liberal vision of a Minnesota acculturated to a welfare state, well, it's OK. It's for a good cause.

If you understand Sturdevant's logic, you understand liberalism. And it should scare the daylights out of you. And for making the liberal position crystal clear, conservatives owe Sturdevant their thanks. I could not have defined liberalism any better.

Michael R. Wigley is chairman of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota.