David Brooks Shows Us The Problem With Big Ideas Especially When They Come From Him

One of David Brooks' criticisms of the Obama Administration has been that it proposes small bore ideas to deal with big problems.  In this article, David Brooks offers one his big ideas.  He starts off with the wrong idea and then he recites some of the problems that we see in Washington and he arrives at his favorite place. That is, as an advocate of Republican ideals. In his first paragraph he argues that democracy has weakened because we no longer have the threat of the Soviet Union.  It is more commonly argued that the fall of the Soviet Union has left capitalism with no economic rival and that capitalists have taken advantage of the monopoly.  The welfare state is no longer needed to ward off the threat of communism. He then recites several of the problems with our electoral system, and rather than offering a solution, he recites all of the problems that he sees in our form of democracy.  He ends the article by advocating the privatization of public education (in order to get more diversity?); he argues for consumer directed healthcare, when healthcare has none of the features of commodity markets, and he wants local charities to replace government welfare programs.  If one skipped the rest of the article, and just read the second last paragraph, one might ask why Brooks had to write the rest of the article to get to his conclusions.  He manages to get to the same conclusions by any route that he takes.