The Party Of No Government

There is great danger when a political party ceases to believe in government, almost in its entirety, and with the modern Republican Party, this is almost where we are.

The objective in seeking election is shifting from improving government to destroying it. It's Trojan horse politics. The current state of today's Republican Party is such that they themselves, in most cases, would enthusiastically embrace such a charge. Not for nothing are the current crop of GOP Presidential candidates competing with each other over how many government departments they will close down, wholesale, if they win.

Through such a nihilistic lens it is easy to see how, even where a policy initiative by the President has a decent chance of improving people's lives - through job creation, improved health care or education, for example - they would still wish to destroy it. In fact, the more public good a policy threatens to deliver, the more the reason to destroy it. Higher deficits, therefore, as Dick Cheney famously said, don't matter. In fact, as a way of threatening the very foundations of government, they're a good thing. It is no coincidence that such higher deficits have been the outcome of recent Republican administrations and would be the inevitable outcome of virtually every plan laid out by the GOP hopefuls to date: Herman Cain's popular (in Republican circles) 9-9-9 plan, guaranteeing to explode the deficit to levels not seen since World War II, being a case in point.

Another perverse consequence of this masochistic approach to government is the relentless outsourcing of whole swathes of government to corporate America. This results in a blurring of the boundaries between governing and lobbying. During the Bush administration, in 2002, when a federal judge ordered the release of 13,500 pages relating to the previously secret proceedings of the administration's energy task force, the world learned that their energy plan was copied and pasted - almost in its entirety - from the recommendations of the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries.

This week, however, their lobby-governing agenda reached the dizzying heights of the ridiculous. Obama’s Department of Agriculture had been planning to introduce limitations on the amount of potato, starchy and high-salt foods that could be served in school lunches. The new joint House-Senate agriculture spending bill, however, not only prohibits the raising of such standards, it has gone as far as to define a pizza as a vegetable! Why? Because it contains tomato paste, which, incidentally, probably contains more sugar in it than tomato. Not that tomato is a vegetable anyway. This is, of course, not what the doctor ordered, but certainly what the frozen food industry ordered.

In such a climate, there is little political downside (for Republicans) in making millions interchanging between governing and lobbying either implicitly - as in Newt Gingrich's case - or explicitly as in Herman Cain's case with the National Restaurant Association. Perry's close ties to the oil industry become an asset, rather than a drag, and any candidate's ignorance becomes a badge of honor. Who better to crash a car than someone who has no idea how to drive it?

The GOP are rapidly shifting from the party of small government to the party of no government. By 2012 this transformation will have reached such a level that in the election of that year, it is the very existence of government as we know it that will be on the ballot.

... have everything privatized and deregulated.

Which will mean that we are increasingly governed not by leaders we elected and can replace, but by overlords over whom we have no power whatsoever.

Almost all of the politicians in DC are bought and paid for, and legislation is written on K street. The overlords are already running the show- they allow DC to exist to make us think we are represented.

Then sub-Saharan Africa would be the world's strongest economic block today!

I am from one of those sub saharan African country and its not private control but big very bad and corrupt government that is the problem. A quarter of the cars you see on the road are some sort of govt cars, the schools are more or less exclusively run by the govt. Every govt office takes bribes for everything, we had to renew our car registration and the DMV worker came over to our house(extra $100 bribe) to register our cars for us, the road worthy test was skipped which was another $20 bribe and the process that usually took 3 weeks to complete was done in 30mins because of bribes.

I am talking about Nigeria in this instance so not trying to make a blanket statement on the rest of the sub saharan African countries but apart from the oil fields almost everything imaginable is stll run by the govt.

But my family are from a developing nation too and, whenever I visit I see how little regulation there is. Businesses can do what ever they want. The most they might have to do is to bribe the right official, and this is true in a number of areas. As a result there is a lack of proper regulation and public protection, just as the Republicans would have it. The greatest victims, of course, are the hard working majority who are so regularly and deeply failed by what is essentially no more than a pseudo-government.

rights and whom you can marry. Small governmnet for the corporations and restrictive government for the people.

But not the rest of it.

It'd be a ship of state without a crew