Steven Conn: Big Government-Small Government Debate Distorts History

Steven Conn, a professor of history and director of the public history initiative at Ohio State University, is the author of the forthcoming book "To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government."

Every four years Americans are presented with different visions of the future and are asked to choose between them. This year, we've been told, the choice is between two conceptions of government: small versus big. The Republican presidential ticket of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan has promised to "restore" America to its "small government" past.

Any vision of the future is built upon a certain understanding of the past. Although past and future are inextricably linked, we spend much less time evaluating candidates as historians than we do assessing their skills as fortunetellers able to predict the future.

As historians, Romney, Ryan and the rest of the GOP insist that the federal government is the mortal enemy of the private sector, and that government only functions to impinge on the freedoms of the people. "Individual initiative made the desert bloom," said Barry Goldwater, godfather of the New Right of the 1960s....