July 18, 2006
I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU ALL, BUT I GOT CLOSE TO DOING IT IN COLLEGE:
The GOP: Drinking Itself Sober (Douglas Kern, 18 July 2006, TCS)
My handy Republican catechism tells me that The Three Deadly Republican Spending Rationalizations are:
1) "This program will be expensive, wasteful, and corrosive to the virtues that make a free society function, but it's popular, and we need it in order to keep the Republican majority."
2) "This program will be expensive, wasteful, and corrosive to the virtues that make a free society function, but it's necessary in the name of national security."
3) "This program will be expensive and wasteful, but it will actually improve the virtues that make a free society function, because it uses the power and affluence of a large central government to subsidize independence, self-discipline, decentralization, and the rejection of the welfare state mentality."
Numbers 1 and 3 sure sound familiar, don't they?
Posted by Pepys at July 18, 2006 8:26 PMComments
Except that all three are obviously self-contradictory.
Are we going to not have a national defense because it's expensive, wasteful and corrosive? Etc...
Or is our military cheap, useful, and consistent with our values even if we do spend more than the rest of the world combined?
Mr. Kern makes a classic libertarian error assuming that the ideal form of government would be none. He's worried about means when only ends matter.