Straw man? How so?
I already established above that the Tea Party and Republicans are nearly indistinguishable.
Earlier this year they tried to re-establish PAYGO rules for the budget. Rules which, I might add, were in place under Clinton and got tossed by the congress when Bush and the Republicans controlled it. How did the PAYGO rule fair? It was passed on a party-line vote with all Republicans opposing it.
Name one Democrat who has ever campaigned on the propostion that government is not big enough. Name one.
Democrats support specific programs. The Tea Party campaigns against government in general. That is the difference.
Ahhh yes, things were best for the budget in the halcyon days of the 1980s and 2000s, not like the huge debt increases that took place in the 1990s.
Reality FAIL.
For added measure here is the Republican alternative:
Still not seeing the straw man.
Because there are no members of congress or serious candidates for congress who are saying, “Government is the problem, business should take over.”
There are members of Congress who have said that business is the problem and that government should take over - everyone who advocates for a single-payer system of health care is saying this. And, according to your apparent way of thinking, there is no logical end point to this - once they take over the health care system, they will then go on to take over the pharmaceutical industry, agriculture, manufacturing, and every other part of the American economy.
IOW, Democrats can be shown to be Marxist just as easily as Tea Partiers are attempting to eliminate the government in favor of private business, or whatever it is you are trying to set up as their position.
Regards,
Shodan
nm
In effect yes, they are.
Here’s a list of the “no members of congress or serious candidates” who signed on to the above (can’t post it here…too many).
Not the same thing at all because they are not broadly saying government should take over (where conservatives are broadly saying government needs to be shrunk). It is even fine to say the government should be smaller but you need to look at the pieces and see what can be done to make them better…what makes the most sense. Looking at health care, which is privately run and noting it was hugely inefficient, hugely expensive, produced worse results for all that than socialized medicine and missed covering a large percentage of the population and posed a very real systemic threat to the fiscal health of the nation is not that same as saying “socialize everything”.
Did the Dems socialize the banks?
OK, then let’s see a cite where they say so. And no, your cites to date do not say so. Just the opposite -
It takes a certain chutzpah to claim you believe the Tea Party wants to turn all the functions of the government over to business in the same thread where you yourself post a cite proving otherwise.
Regards,
Shodan
Oh for fuck’s sake. :smack:
Getting tired of repeating this.
I DO NOT THINK THE TEA PARTY PEOPLE ARE ANARCHISTS!
Get it this time?
“Oh for fuck’s sake” yourself. You don’t even know yourself what you are arguing.
No one in the Tea Party movement thinks the government is incompetent at everything. You haven’t come up with any cites that show the Tea Party movement thinks the government is incompetent at everything. Your own cite shows that the Tea Party movement does not think the government is incompetent at everything. Therefore, the principle of “the government is incompetent at everything” cannot be applied to what the Tea Party says. That’s a strawman, as has been pointed out a dozen or fifteen times.
Regards,
Shodan
Read the title of this thread again.
Numerous cites have been provided of conservatives (essentially) saying “government is the problem” and saying government needs to be smaller.
Fine.
WHERE DOES IT STOP?
As mentioned before how low a tax is low enough? Which taxes? How much regulation is just enough?
When liberals went after health care it was because of specific issues unique to health care. They did not try and socialize American society in all respects.
So, per the thread title how do we avoid the admittedly absurd end point of the conservative argument?
Where is the line drawn?
Why is it a strawman to ask that when their position, so far, broadly says to reduce government? Am I as a citizen and a voter supposed to be content with my representatives saying, “I’m going to cut programs and cut taxes” without telling me what taxes and what programs and how far they will go in their zeal?
I would like to also add that it’s entirely possible to believe that government is generally incompetent, but that it should still do certain things, because the alternative is worse.
It’s also possible to believe that government incompetence varies with what it tries to do. It may be very competent at running a judicial system, and utterly incapable of reasonably regulating a modern complex economy.
And when people say “Government is the problem”, they’re not saying all government, at all times, is the problem. They’re saying that THIS government at THIS time at THIS size is the problem.
You guys are being willfully obtuse because you think you’ve hit upon some new argument you can use to bash ‘tighty righties’ or ‘tea baggers’ or whatever epithet for them you’re hurling around these days. But it’s a ridiculous argument, and you look stupid trying to promote it.
If you want a specific answer to your question, I’ve said many times that empirical evidence seems to indicate that a government that’s somewhere around 25% of GDP overall is about right. Canada reduced the size of its government from 53% of GDP to 33%, and nothing but good has come of that. Shave another 10% off that, and you’ll be at the point where the government safety net is still largely in place but people become more responsible for their own actions.
But it’s not just about the size of government in terms of spending. It’s also about the appropriate use of the government’s regulatory power to shape and control the private lives of citizens. Government can do a lot of damage (or a lot of good) without spending money, by simply being really good at setting up the regulatory framework for society. The U.S. government at pretty much every level is really bad at this. And it’s not just about too much regulation, it’s about the wrong kind of regulation. The regulatory structure in the U.S. is tugged and pulled by myriad forces, special interests, and ideologues. It’s an incoherent mess.
That’s not true. The health care plan includes a healthy dose of wealth redistribution in it. It includes unrelated measures that burden businesses, such as the 1099 requirement that was put into the bill to help raise money.
And of course, the health care bill was just the start of the Democrat’s plans. The left is plenty mad with Obama because he hasn’t brought the hammer of government down on enough people fast enough. They want cap and trade. They want card check. They want more taxes on businesses and the rich. They want major ‘investments’ in things they think are important, paid for with taxes on other people. For all that Obama has done so far to grow government, he’s still got his left flank roiling mad because he’s not statist enough for them.
And plenty of democrats on this board routinely talk about how society has been ‘de-regulated’ and business has run amok, and it’s time for a new round of regulation.
Obama has said, “You know, at some point I think you’ve made enough money”, indicating that he’s very much a wealth redistributionist who wants to limit how rich you can become in America.
I’ve been around long enough to see that the liberal impulse to continue regulating, controlling, and directing public and private life is no where near its limit. There’s always a new crisis, a new social plan, a new underclass that needs to be helped. There’s always someone hurt in the marketplace who needs further protection. There’s always someone making too much money, and someone else not getting what they ‘deserve’. There’s always a community in need of organizing against some peril that only government can fix.
I don’t really see an end in sight to that, other than to stop it by standing athwart history yelling, “Stop!”, as the National Review’s masthead says.
This “aha” tactic is stupid and tiresome; you’re disagreeing with a particular philosophy and your argument is that it’s illegitimate because it’s not defined down to a gnat’s ass to your satisfaction … at which point you will criticize it for being pedantic and irrational.
Newsflash: All political philosophies are subject to that sort of scrutiny, and all are on a general philosophical push that is often defined only in contrast to existing policy - Democrats and liberals included.
Your line of reasoning is pointless; I too could think of countless examples to turn the self-same argument to the other side of the table, but you’d find some idiotic way to counter that that’s not the same thing.
I really have no dog in this fight, but this silliness is just your thinking you’ve found some smoking gun that simply does not exist.
And your and Sam’s (among others) evasiveness is tiresome.
Define down to a gnat’s ass indeed.
It is not defined at all which is the point.
WHAT federal agencies will be cut/disbanded?
WHAT federal programs will be ended?
WHAT federal taxes will be decreased?
WHAT regulations will be minimized or ended?
So far there is nothing but evasion on these issues. Just vague hand waving that Government = Bad (tolerated only in a few narrow areas such as defense).
They are critical and deeply important questions. Social Security is a fifth of the federal budget and an entitlement. I wonder how many Tea Partiers would be cool with ending that handout (remembering Tea Party signs warning the government to keep its hands off of their Social Security)?
More importantly, WHY DON’T YOU WANT TO KNOW?
Get ten liberals in a room and they may have ten different ways to fix health care but neither are they suggesting that as long as they are on about health care they may as well socialize the auto industry, Wall Street and the Ma & Pop Convenience store while they are at it.
You may disagree with them on health care reform but it is a defined issue and not, “Let’s just get business out of the way because private business is the problem.”
"What businesses?, you might ask.
“Just business,” they respond. “We’ll just start whacking at it and let you know when we are done.”
That would be an acceptable answer from a Congresscritter for you?
HA That pretty much sums it all up.
What they’re really saying is that THIS government is the problem, because at THIS time THIS government isn’t REPUBLICAN, which is too say THIS government is too far to the LEFT.
Which also means THIS size is wrong. What size is it? What is the right size? Well, it’s the same size as the last government, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that THIS government is wrong, and THIS size is too big.
As soon as a Republican government gets elected, THIS size at THIS time will be perfect.
It’s like of like Goldilocks but with only one bed and one bowl of oatmeal, and a serious disconnect with reality.
Regards,
emacknight
Specific ‘government’ run programs yes?
Yes. And your point is?
Yes, I agree with the general principle. To use a metaphor: A warehouse full of chainsaws says nothing about one’s skill at pedagogy.
Then the answer is to fix the government, to have its mission & composition changed. Throwing out 30% of the chainsaws doesn’t train a single schoolteacher. Fixing the government may mean expansion in some sectors.
But unfortunately, in this country, we literally have a subset of the right that will object to the schoolteacher being hired because, “Chainsaws are the sole obligation of this warehouse according to Gawd!”
Absent historical data, the rest of your post is Hayekian scrapple.