Fair warning: it’s about to get Political all up in this.
I realized over the weekend the problem with the Republican Party: it calls itself conservative, and yet it’s no more conservative than the average pinko commie socialist, at least if you judge by the current crop of Presidential candidates. They couldn’t care less about small government or minimal regulations, except insofar as it helps big business. (I’d like to be able to exclude Ron Paul from that statement, but can’t, for reasons that will be made clear shortly.)
Sure they want to cut taxes (for the wealthiest Americans) and shrink entitlements (for the poorest Americans), and they say they don’t trust government. But that’s not true; it’s just that they disagree with progressives over what they trust government to do. They don’t trust government to provide a safety net, education, or important research funding, but they sure as hell trust government to do the following things:
- Decide which drugs are legal or illegal without any scientific basis whatsoever
- Monitor the uterus of each American woman to ensure that any fetuses that are conceived are carried to term
- Prevent as many people as possible from getting access to the things that make sex safe and non-procreative
- Spy on everyone of Middle Eastern descent to make sure they aren’t up to something
- Decide who is allowed to marry whom
- Engage in “nation-building,” aka invade other countries with little or no provocation
(And isn’t interesting how quiet the Ron Paul campaign has been on the first two issues?)
The question for both parties isn’t the size of government; they both want it pretty big. Progressives would like to see large entitlement programs; the Republican Party (which I refuse to call “conservative”) wants to see a massive Defense system and plenty of moral control. Liberals, of course, are more than willing to actually fund their government, via a fair progressive tax system. The GOP, despite all its screaming about deficits and bankrupting the country, wants to cut taxes without making any serious effort to shrink the largest spending programs.
