The Democrats have done a good job of making themselves sound like Republicans in their newly proposed "Innovation Agenda."

Unfortunately, they’ve also taken up the Republicans’ recent fondness for big government and used the language to dress up their own adoration for telling all of us how to go about our lives. They’ve created a set of proposals for gargantuan government. Read it here if you have a strong stomach.

It all shows just what a culture of dependency the United States has become. . . .

As if the expansion of government interference in Americans’ lives under President George W. Bush weren’t enough already, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats propose an “Innovation Agenda” that will extend the reach and tighten the grip of government’s tendrils much further.

It should be called the Intrusion Agenda, because that’s really what it is.

Pelosi and the Democrats propose to intrude the national government into individual, local community, and state decisions about who teaches what in our schools at every level. They would destroy the higher education student loan market through price caps. They want to entice farmers to divert production away from food, making it more costly, in order to produce extravagantly expensive biofuels that won’t appreciably reduce our use of fossil fuels or do anything about global warming. They would strangle our nation’s amazingly productive and innovative research and development infrastructure by putting the federal government in charge. They intend to have bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. decide what fuels we should produce and how we use them. They want to put the federal government in charge of the Internet and wireless communications by replacing innovative market solutions with intrusive government mandates. And they want to push the federal government into the decision-making processes of our nation’s small businesses, our greatest job-creators.

And that’s just the parts they’re willing to tell us about. Pelosi and the Democrats are making the most misguided aspects of the Bush agenda the model for a huge further expansion of government power over our lives.

The Democrats’ plan is no innovation, it is even more of the big-government meddling we have suffered under for decades. We don’t need an Intrusion Agenda—we need, as Ronald Reagan said, to “get the government off the backs of the people.”

Now that would be an innovation!