By Ruth Marcus - August 31, 2011

WASHINGTON -- Rick Perry is no George W. Bush.

This is not a compliment.

Perry's 2010 tea party-steeped manifesto, "Fed Up!," makes George Bush look like George McGovern. Perry has said he wasn't planning to run for president when he wrote the book, and it shows:

-- The Texas governor floats the notion of repealing the 16th Amendment, which authorized the federal income tax. Perry describes the amendment as "the great milestone on the road to serfdom" because it "was the birth of wealth redistribution in the United States."

Raise your hand if you believe, as Perry suggests, that it is wrong to ask the wealthiest to pay a greater share of their income than the poor.

-- He lambastes the 17th Amendment, which instituted direct election of senators, as a misguided "blow to the ability of states to exert influence on the federal government" that "traded structural difficulties and some local corruption for a much larger and dangerous form of corruption."

Raise your hand if you'd like to give the power to elect senators back to your state legislature.

-- Perry laments the New Deal as "the second big step" -- the 16th and 17th amendments being the first -- "in the march of socialism and ... the key to releasing the remaining constraints on the national government's power to do whatever it wishes."

-- He specifically targets Social Security for "violently tossing aside any respect for our founding principles of federalism and limited government," and asserts that "by any measure, Social Security is a failure."

Not by the measure of the share of elderly living in poverty. Perry's description of Social Security as a "Ponzi scheme" was impolitic, but he has a legitimate point about the program's funding imbalance. The bigger problem is his fundamental hostility to the notion of a federal role in retirement security -- or, more broadly, a federal role in much of anything besides national defense.

-- As much as he dislikes the New Deal, Perry is even less happy about the Great Society, suggesting that programs such as Medicare are unconstitutional. "From housing to public television, from the environment to art, from education to medical care, from public transportation to food, and beyond, Washington took greater control of powers that were conspicuously missing from Article 1 of the Constitution," he writes.