FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE CHURCH OF GROVER:

Budget cuts: GOP fetish? (George Will, 10/03/05, Jewish World Review)

This autumn's angriest political controversy is reaching a roiling boil in this state. Conservatives, especially, are arguing, with their characteristic internecine fury, about whether a change in fiscal facts should cause Colorado to change its mind about a rule restricting government spending. Come November, there will be a referendum on a temporary relaxation of the state's "taxpayer bill of rights" — Tabor. [...]

[Governor Bill] Owens resisted the Legislature's demand to gut Tabor by indexing the growth of government spending to the growth of personal income rather than to population growth and inflation. Still, by advocating passage of the Tabor referendum, he has infuriated some conservatives.

This in spite of his record of promoting school choice, cutting taxes, opposing other governors' attempt to grab revenues by imposing Internet taxation, and using the line-item veto to cut 50 times more spending in his first five years than other Colorado governors cut in the preceding 24 years. He vetoed 47 bills this year, half of which, he says, promoted organized labor's agenda.

Those now calling Owens an apostate from the church of conservatism need to answer two questions. Is one deviation from doctrinal purity sufficient grounds for excommunication? Is a political creed that is so monomaniacal about taxation that it allows no latitude for tacking with shifting fiscal winds a philosophy of governance or an ideological fetish?

Eric Hoffer answered that one:

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 3, 2005 7:59 AM