"It's big government conservatism writ large"

Via Althouse, it's Jonah Goldberg ripping up Huckabee. Apropos of Jonah's answer to the question Ann quotes, I'd go back to a passage from Barry Goldwater's book that I've quoted here and elsewhere many times, wherein Goldwater took to task Arthur Larson, who'd written four years earlier in his book A Republican Looks At His Party that “if a job has to be done to meet the needs of the people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government.” Goldwater (entirely properly, in my view) categorically rejected this position. He accused (entirely correctly) Larson and like-minded Republicans of accepting “an unqualified repudiation of the principle of limited government," of completely ignoring the need for "reference ... to the Constitution" or any theory of "the legitimate functions of government." In their "assumption that it is the government itself that determines what needs to be done," Goldwater argued, the Larsonites had embraced "the first principle of totalitarianism: that the state is competent to do all things and is limited in what it actually does only by the will of those who control the state.” The Constitution, Goldwater warned, is “a system of restraints against the natural tendency of government to expand in the direction of absolutism.” If I read Jonah correctly, his problem with Huckabee is that Huckabee is a Larsonite in that debate, which of course, I have a major problem with [CLARIFICATION: that is, I have a major problem with Huckabee if Goldberg's correct].

Related: Thompson, abortion, federalism | About Ron Paul | An open letter to Congressional candidates about federalism and limited government | Fred on federalism

Post facto:
Spanners in the works (5/12/08)
The GOP universe (11/7/08)