TheAgitator.com
Jeff Flake: Let’s Clean House
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008Libertarianish Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) wastes no time in taking to the op-ed page of the Washington Post with a roadmap for the GOP:
I suggest that we return to first principles. At the top of that list has to be a recommitment to limited government. After eight years of profligate spending and soaring deficits, voters can be forgiven for not knowing that limited government has long been the first article of faith for Republicans.
Of course, it’s not the level of spending that gets the most attention; it’s the manner in which the spending is allocated. The proliferation of earmarks is largely a product of the Gingrich-DeLay years, and it’s no surprise that some of the most ardent practitioners were earmarked by the voters for retirement yesterday. Few Americans will take seriously Republican speeches on limited government if we Republicans can’t wean ourselves from this insidious practice. But if we can go clean, it will offer a stark contrast to the Democrats, who, after two years in training, already have their own earmark favor factory running at full tilt.
Second, we need to recommit to our belief in economic freedom. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations may be on the discount rack this year, but the free market is still the most efficient means to allocate capital and human resources in an economy, and Americans know it. Now that we’ve inserted government deeply into the private sector by bailing out banks and businesses, the temptation will be for government to overstay its welcome and force the distribution of resources to serve political ends. Substituting political for economic incentives is not the recipe for economic recovery.
Most House Republicans opposed the recent bailout and will be in a strong position to promote economic freedom over central planning as the Obama administration stumbles from industry to industry trying to determine which is small enough to be allowed to fail and which is not. Since timetables will be in vogue, perhaps Republicans could even insist on a timetable for getting the government out of the private sector.
Flake expressed similar sentiments to reason back in 2006. Perhaps this time his party will listen to him, and jettison the Blunt-Boehner leadership.
I see London, I see France, I see Radley’s HTML code.
LibertarianISH is an astute description of Flake. Sometimes I love the guy, other times I want to bury him in the same hole as the rest of Congress (with the exception of Ron Paul).
I’ll believe Fiscal Small Government is a hallmark of the new Republican party when they take on the biggest piece of bloat in the Federal Budget.
Cutting Military Spending
I’m not at all optimistic that the Republicans will learn the right lessons from this election. Sure, some will jump on the “smaller government” bandwagon because it may become in vogue. But they’ll toss that aside as soon as they get in power again. The other idiots will look at the results and say “gee, I guess we just didn’t pick the right kind of big government.” Douches.
You know how I know Flake is lying?
His fingers are typing.
Politics is war.
The first casualty of war is truth.
Two numbers I would like to see extinguished from our national budget:
$1,000,000,000,000 – Military
$1,000,000,000,000 – Foreign Aid
If that is not overspending, I don’t know what is.
Agreed, because these douchebags (99% of our damned public servants) realize what they can get away with and will only differ on how to inflict it.
The definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. The people, incubated in government schooling, entranced with amusing-ourselves-to-death mass media, and subconsciously absorbing the moral relativism of the age, DO NOT WANT limited government. They want a secular god who will provide for them, fix their boo-boos, and tell them everything is going to be all right.
I am not a believer, but I have recently taken the Serenity Prayer as my mantra when it comes to politics. I plan on focusing on more important and enjoyable things from now on. One of the things I will miss (and like any addiction I will probably lapse from time to time) is this site. You do good work.
I have to laugh when people point to defense and foreign aid first.I don’t care for most foreign aid but it is a small part of the budget.Defense is a constitutional power for the federal government,though ,there could be cutting there too.The real problems are in S.S,Medicare,farm bills,education spending,the drug war and a tax code that makes no sense and costs a tremendous amount to manage for the government and the private sector.I do not see the election as anything more then the continuation of the last 60 years,since F.D.R.When someone with the views of Walter Williams is elected I’ll believe otherwise.
Eric,
If we are to believe your numbers (and one cannot), you are saying that $2t of the federal outlays of ~$3.1t are spent on military and foreign aid. Laughable, sir. Laughable.
The total defense spending for FY 2009 is $650b. Foreign aid (depending on the definition) ranges from $1b to $21b.
Social security and medicare/medicaid, however, consume ~42% of the budget (and are rising dramatically). They combine for roughly $1.2t on the outlays.
Pork, OTOH, is really a non-issue. Even higher-end estimates put it at roughly $50b.
What all this means – if you want to attack federal spending, you HAVE to attack entitlement programs.
I hope others listen to Flake, but my general response is the same as my response to Obama’s call for change: I’ll believe it when I see it.
On a side note, anybody else notice the ad on the right column of the Agitator front page that reads: “JUSTICE PAYS: Get the education you need tp [sic] advance your law enforcement career.”? I’m not sure what’s funnier, that they’re advertising to police officers on this site* or that they’re too lazy to proof-read.
* As a disclaimer, I realize that some law enforcement officers are frequent visitors to this site, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. I’m just guessing they’re not a large demographic of the readership on the whole.
Rep. Paul Ryan from Wisconsin said essentially the same thing last night.
Here’s why McCain lost, in my mind.
1. “Young” voters. For whatever reason, Generation X (and Y) have been ignored by both parties for far too long. I’m not saying that Obama directly targeted us, but I will say he connected with us in a way that John McCain couldn’t, and better than any in recent memory. Stop giving handouts to people just because they’re old and quit making me finance both my father’s retirement and my own.
2. Fiscal recklessness and general un-libertarianness from the Republican party. By appealing to their radical base, they lost all the important swing voters. They’ve completely and totally lost the fiscal conservatives and the libertarians. Those alone are enough to decide an election.
However, they’ve also alienated the atheists and people of religions other than Christianity. That’s not a huge percentage of Americans, but it is a sizeable minority — easily enough for half of them to decide this election.
3. Well, I had a third point, but I can’t remember it.
I’m sure now that they’ve lost the white house and the congress the republicans will be all about limited government.
Well, Flake’s comment is a nice tip of the hat, but I’d like a little more substantive information on what he means by “economic freedom.” Absent any such elaboration, it’s a pretty safe bet that what he means is the *neoliberal* idea of “free markets.”
If we’re going to have a real free market, and not just Reagan/Thatcher corporatism, we need to eliminate the kinds of state intervention that the Republicans and Tom Friedman-style Democrats don’t count.
That means, especially, so-called “intellectual property” [sic]. As a first step, we need a repeal of the DMCA, the Uruguay TRIPS accord, and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. We also need a radical scaling back of patent law; it’s not only one of the most powerful weapons for cartelizing an industry in the hands of a few oligopoly industries, but it reinforces a push distribution model based on planned obsolescence by prohibiting the manufacture of generic spare parts.
It means ceasing to use the Commerce Clause to preempt state tort law, and thereby to insulate pollutors and other corporate malfeasors from accountability. It means ceasing to treat the EPA’s and USDA’s regulatory standards as a de facto maximum standard that preempts traditional common law standards of liability, and even prohibits commercial free speech (like rBGH-free milk) or voluntary adherence to a higher standard (like voluntary testing of cattle for mad cow disease at higher rates than required by law). If we’re to have a genuine free market, we need a vigorous civil liability system as a substitute for the regulatory state. That means returning to the common law’s original standards of liability as they existed in the early 19th century, before “commerce-friendly” courts decided to give businesses a free pass on the harm they did to others so long as they “didn’t mean it” (see Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, vol. 1).
It means ceasing to use federal bankruptcy law to free creditors of the transaction costs of verifying ability to repay, and ceasing to put the state in a position of enforcing a promise to pay through Chapter 13 debt slavery. I agree with Spooner that a creditor is entitled to whatever’s available from the defaulting debtor’s assets at the time of bankruptcy, period–no liens on future production.
It means an end to the use of subsidized freeways and zoning laws to promote the car culture and suburban monocultures. It means funding the Interstate on a cost basis (i.e., mainly charging weight-based fees to heavy trucks), and ditto for airports. It means ending the use of eminent domain to build new roads or expand old ones beyond their original rights of way.
In short, it means taking corporate America off the taxpayer tit. And I’m guessing that’s not exactly what Flake had in mind.
I take it about as seriously as Bob Dole reading the Tenth Amendment off his little index card at all his stump speeches in 1996.
Pork is a non-issue if you just look at the dollars directly spent. The problem is the corruption that it brings, which far outweighs the dollar amounts that you see.
Most people do not believe in freedom or liberty. They believe and pushing their morals and values onto others. Whether its progressive taxation, marriage laws, labor laws, etc, its all the same. The vast majority of people will always want to exert power over others one way or another. They are pigs.
I’m not sure he’s really on the right track.
Yes, the GOP lacks credibility as the party of fiscal restraint and small government. But I think a more important factor in this election was competence. One of the things the GOP is going to have to work hard to counter is the notion that their ideology makes them incompetent administrators of government. That’s something I think a lot of people have taken away from the Bush years–you know, that he did such a bad job because he was contemptuous of government in the first place and didn’t really care if it worked right or not. Now, I’m not sure that’s totally accurate, but I do think a lot of people believe it to some degree or another. And that’s reflected in the election–Obama clearly cares about government, and clearly wants to make it work. So even if people maybe aren’t totally behind his big government liberalism, they prefer his projection of competent stewardship to McCain’s erratic showboating.
The other issue, I think, is the GOP’s reliance on stale social issues and prejudices. These just don’t resonate for that many people anymore. A lot of us who may want smaller, more trade-friendly government just can’t stomach voting for people who campaign on homophobia, for example. So I think the GOP would be wise to downplay these issues or perhaps find creative ways around them. There’s a common proposition to stop having the government administer marriages–everyone, gay or straight, gets a civil union instead, with the same benefits, and marriage itself is left up to private institutions. You’d never see this coming from the GOP, but why not? It actually removes government influence from religious bodies and the private sector. It’s fair. It promotes the idea that when government is involved in something, it should be involved to the smallest degree. So why not? Well, because the GOP can’t in any way suggest that homosexuality might be okay.
I am hearing all of these “return to the true faith” calls from the GOP. For libertarians and moderates, the question will be what is the “true faith” that the GOP comes to: will it be libertarian-ish; mercantilist; populist; or crazy social conservatism.
I am not going to listen to what they say: I will follow what they DO.
I will wait to see
(a) what bills they offer up in Congress and how they vote
(b) how their governors act
(b) who they nominate in 2012. If it is Palin, say hello to another DEM victory.
Well, I don’t think it’s going to happen, but another small-govt Taxpayer Bill of Rights would certainly be welcome.
The next two years are likely to be economically gruesome. People will blame the Dems since they control the leg and the exec. Maybe 2010 will be like 1994 ushering in a new batch of fiscal conservatives?
It would be sweet. But I agree with most of the commenters above that the the GOP might still f*** it up with a hee-haw religious-right populist in 2012.
SJE,
I came up with some slogans for a Palin candidacy. :)
Palin in ’12: Because we’re not ready to admit we’re wrong.
Palin in ’12: Because that’s the best we’ve got.
Palin in ’12: Because we’re fucking retards.
It would be nice to have a fiscally conservative party, but that is absolutely meaningless to me unless they are also willing to abandon unlawful detention, torture, and pre-emptive murder (oh, excuse me “interventionist foreign policy”)
Until then fuck em. I’m with the Dems until they launch their own senseless war… so at least until January ’09
And why do I get the impression that even if the GOP does suddenly re-convert itself back to limiting spending (which it hasn’t stood for since Reagan) it will be limiting spending on only those things that Democrats want? They’ll still advocate massive spending on things that the GOP agrees with.
So, basically, the GOP position going into 2009 will be “yeah, we know you voted Democrat but we’re only going to let you spend on GOP priorities”, whilst pretending to be for all spending restraint.
Ha HA!! Jeff Flake has no chance!! I can already see the RNC leaders making the swirly motion with their finger around their temple and pointing at Jeff.
Flaky, blunt, boners? Palin who?. By 2012, Palin will be an unremembered historical sideline, except amongst the christer crowd.
It really doesn’t matter if the repubs do make some token gestures to smaller government principals. Their base is too heavily authoritarian. They will never be civil libertarians. It’s not in their best interest.