Democrats, not to be outdone...
posted by mochi at 4:33 PM
Saturday, August 13, 2005
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13 Comments:
NL - Fair and Balanced!
ha!
Have a good weekend, Mochi! Did the DVD arrive yet?
-Jack
There's a ticking package in my mailbox is that it?
Not yet...
Mochi,
Know this isn't related to this post, but I thought the NL fiscal conservatives would find this article interesting:
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/marktapscott/mt20050813.shtml
-Jack
Reagan was also guilty of over spending. I'd equate financing an unnecessary bridge in Alaska to trying to fire missiles out of the air with satellities.
To the point of the article. It's all about checks and balances. Without the someone saying, "Do we really need this shit?" You have a bunch of Republicans all agreeing with each other at every level of government. Unfortunately we may not see a backlash until the next Presedential election. Senators spending money on their electorates are unlikely to be voted out!
An article I read once (I lost the link!) said that our goverment runs most efficiently when different parties control the different branches of government, providing checks and balances as much as possible. Sounds logical to me.
Shea, it makes sense. I think the best government is the government that governs least, and I love it when the branches stalemate. Keeps them out of our hair and less likely to interfere with our lives.
-Jack
p.s. I do believe that Republicans have betrayed their constituents faith.
Maybe it's time for a fiscally conservative, socially aware party with a small government approach to policy?
Bloggers might just invent one. The blog party!
The biggest problem with that new party is the difficulty of not spending money on tons of entitlements. Socially aware is one thing, but it seems like a lot of socially aware people feel the answer is to take tax money and start throwing it at society's problems - creating an over reaching nanny state in the process.
Entitlements? Like food? C'mon I'd prefer a party that spends money on poor people than one that spends $200 million on a bridge in Alaska for 8,000 people. $200 million would feed 20,000 American kids for a year. Everyone always talks about entitlements but driving around poor neighborhoods in my city I'm not seeing many people who look entitled.
My cynicism comes from spending a summer working for a check cashing outfit. Welfare families would line up once a month to cash their checks. Seeing designer (or at least faux designer) clothes, gold (or at least gold plated) jewelry on the "parents" while the kids were filthy and in rags began to grate on my nerves. Frequently I would see three generations of the same family come in together and cash their welfare checks. I'm glad we have some welfare reform, and I believe we need the safety net. But it should be a safety net, not a lifestyle.
Those are the types of entitlements I mean. Once people get on the government dole its tough to get them off.
Perspective:
The official declarations coming out of the G8 meetings in Scotland, as well as the raucous demonstrations surrounding those meetings, talk about saving Africa. But, looking back over the decades and generations, Africa has been "saved" so many times that you have to wonder why it still needs saving.
Desperate and tragic conditions afflict millions in Africa today and any humane person would like to help. But the repeated failures of previous help ought to make us at least question the particular manner in which Africa can be helped.
"Forgiveness" of foreign debts is always high on the agenda of those on the political left.
At any given moment, this would of course free up money that African governments could spend to help relieve their people's distress -- assuming that this is what they would spend it for. But why would anyone think that promoting irresponsible government borrowing by periodically "forgiving" their debts is going to help African countries in the long run?
As for the people of Africa, they have to survive in the short run in order to get to the long run. So emergency aid for emergency conditions makes far more sense than long-run "foreign aid" programs with an almost unbroken track record of failure, not only in Africa but around the world.
Years ago, a courageous economist in India pointed out that, however helpful it was to receive food from abroad during India's famines, the long-run policy of continually giving wheat to India was just reducing the ability of Indian farmers to grow wheat and sell it for a price that would cover their costs.
Eventually the policy of continually dumping wheat into India was stopped and today India produces so much wheat that it has been able to send some to Africa to deal with African famines.
Promoting dependency and irresponsible borrowing is not the way to help the poor internationally any more than these are ways of helping the poor at home. Such policies benefit the bureaucracies that administer foreign aid and enable vain people to see themselves as saviors, even when they are doing more harm than good.
Sub-Saharan Africa has some of the most tragic geographic handicaps of any region of the world. Navigable waterways, which have been crucial to the development of nations and of cultures, are severely limited in most of Africa. Poor soil and inadequate and undependable rainfall patterns shrink the possibilities still further.
Ideologues love to think of African poverty as caused by "exploitation" on the part of Western countries. But, with a few notable exceptions, Africa has had little to be exploited. Even at the height of European imperialism, there was far less foreign trade or foreign investment in the whole vast continent of Africa than in a little country like Belgium or Switzerland.
In more recent times, so-called "foreign aid" has left many monuments of futility in Africa, from rusting machinery and the ruins of many projects to cows sent from Europe that keeled over in the African heat.
With all its handicaps, Africa used to feed itself and even export agricultural produce to Europe. In some of the more geographically favored parts of sub-Saharan Africa, iron was smelted thousands of years ago.
During the first two decades after African nations gained their independence in the 1960s, one sub-Saharan nation that stood out with its economic prosperity and political stability amid economic disasters and social catastrophes among its neighbors was the Ivory Coast under President Felix Houphouet-Boigny.
Yet neither the Ivory Coast nor its leader attracted nearly as much attention, much less adulation, as was showered on Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, or other big-name African leaders who led their countries into ruin.
The Ivory Coast in those days relied on markets instead of the kind of policies and rhetoric that the intelligentsia favored. When its policies changed, it became just another African basket case.
Today, too many people in the West continue to see Africa as an outlet for the visions and policies of the left that have failed in the West and are even more certain to fail in Africa.
The above was an article by Thomas Sowell.
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