Conservatism Is A Disease

Four days left until the big change; It will amaze and please you.

Well, I hope anyway.

One of the big problems with liberals and progressives is that at the drop of a hat they are usually willing to see the failures of market forces everywhere and tend to see government as a solution to a vast spectrum of problems. This is not always true; in fact often government is perfectly wrong as the solution to specific problems. Look at the question of energy generation for the Western United States for instance; the government solution was to dam up every trickle of water. This has created a series of environmental nighmares and the endagerment of several species that were supposed to be helped by the damming.

The converse is true of conservatives. Government, in their eyes, is always the enemy, stifling individual market freedom and liberty. Which leads to the creation of organization such as the Club for Growth who hold that by reducing taxes and government, automatically there will be market growth. Grover Norquist, president of Americans for tax reform, famously stated:

My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

The Nation: Grover Norquist: 'Field Marshal' of the Bush Plan by Robert Dreyfuss, April 26, 2001

Well, now, eleven years after the Republicans have taken control of the House and the Senate, and four and half years after they have taken control of the White House, we can guage with some accuracy the result of this policy:

Picture by High Acidity

What we have seen is that among the Republicans there has been a kind of wierd, hybrid dual effect going on with government. Because they do not respect government at all, they have regarding it as being available to be looted; hence the rash of no bid contracts in Iraq and for the rebuilding of New Orleans and the constant stream of criminal behavior on the part of Republicans (for recent examples do a google search on coingate and Kentucky Governor Fletcher). But the second and actually worse part is that since they regard government in all of its forms as a bad thing, they have been willing to fill it, top to bottom with incompetent political hacks. Which is why almost a month after Hurricane Katrina hit, FEMA cannot get ice delivered to towns near New Orleans, fail to approve contracts for essential work on wastewater treatment facilities and leave skilled volunteers cooling their heels whilst people die.

The last effect power has had on Republicans is that they have failed utterly in their mission to shrink government. In their haste to loot and provide corporate welfare to their sponsors they have realized that government is the goose that lays golden eggs. It is hard to stem that addictive flow of federal money and they have proven unequal to the task. Government spending has ballooned under Republican rule in a ridiculous way.

The result is a nation that is rapidly going the way of third world nations. A small, extremely weathy upper classs, a vanishing middle class and burgeoning lower class. Guess who we tied with in infant mortality this year? Malaysia. Yep. Just a little bit above Nambia and well below any of the European countries.



America, the formerly beautiful.

Time to look for a cure for the disease of conservatism.

Four days.