Wednesday, February 18

How not to fix the Republican party

In response to this misguided Esquire piece I will quote a digg comment:
The author starts out as if they're a moderate with the best interests of the republican party at heart but it quickly becomes clear that this is false.

"can only be described as generational theft." This phrase, it appears, was introduced by the nutty blogger Michelle Malkin" This iterm has long been used to describe transfer programs like social security and medicare. It has also long been used to describe deficit spending. Martin Friedman was using this term while Malkin was still in diapers.

"hearkening back to the grand old days of small government and lone cowpokes just ain't gonna to cut it anymore."

The article does not disagree with the 'lunatic fringe' of the republican party as the author says, it disagrees with the ideological core of the republican party.

The author is saying that the republican party needs to get decimated, cleanse themselves of individualist concepts and adopt out-and-out collectivism. They want to swap out any libertarian ideology that remains and replace it with socialist ideology. Basically, individualism is the reason why republicans get the bulk of their support from moderates. If they abandoned it, the republican party would essentially become a Christian Socialist party and if that's what the country wanted then Huckabee would have had a more successful presidential campaign.

The republicans DO need to hit the reset button. They need to go back to their libertarian, individualistic, 'classic liberal' roots though, not abandon them.
Alas the Republican party as we know it today is mostly illiberal Christian Socialism PLUS TAX CUTS, which is actually more irresponsible than just illiberal Christian Socialism by itself ... because somebody has to pay for that socialism, and it ought not to be future generations.

Unbalanced spending and unbalanced tax cuts are both just different forms of generational theft, though there seems to be a consensus that larger deficits are advisable during a virtually 0% interest downturn like we have now.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Blog Archive