I watched this interview last night on Fox News, and after picking myself up off the floor, I couldn’t believe that no-one has called this out….

“I’m a free market guy, but I’m not going to let this economy crater in order to preserve the free market system.” - President George Bush, Fox News interview.

 

Huh? If you aren’t willing to let the economy take its lumps in order to correct itself, doesn’t that ultimately mean that you’re against the free market system? I mean, all economies have to undergo corrections due to inefficiencies that crop up in the system over time. The difference between the free market system and other economic systems is that free markets correct themselves, whereas other systems are never allowed to self correct.

This runs totally counter to what Reagan said in a 1975 radio speech (does anyone have some links to those BTW?), where he explained that continuing to try to “save” the economy by government spending does nothing but create inflation and leads to economic stagnation (he said this before Carter became president and we had the stagflation during his administration). When Reagan became president, he re-engaged the process of free market capitalism, and lo and behold, it worked! Why don’t we just do that again!

To paraphrase Senator Everett Dirksen…A trillion here and a trillion there – soon we’ll be talking about real money.

So far, we've pushed 6-10 trillion dollars towards bailing out (or, actually, buying) companies and stimulating the economy. So far, the economy shows no signs of being very “stimulated”. 

Through it all, it’s been difficult to understand how a president who ran as a conservative could engage in such blatantly unsound monetary policy.

Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I may have an answer.

Basically, one of the greatest long term threats our country faces, is the slow march towards socialism that we’ve been on for decades. Even when we have a Republican Congress, at best we get a one step forward, two steps back conservatism.   The problem is made worse by the fact that our education and media institutions are solidly anti-conservative, and even the elites in business and the clergy have shown a remarkable degree of deference towards self destructive socialist ideas such as global warming policy.

So how do we get real conservatism to become rooted within the institutions and elites of this country?

Perhaps, a different approach than the one we’ve been doing, would be better.

Let’s consider what the consequences of throwing all this money around is going to do to our government. Right now we’ve thrown trillions at the banking industry and are jacking up our immediate public debt obligations into the 10s of trillions of dollars. We are looking deficit spending that will exceed that which occurred in WWII, but none of the spending is going towards productive uses. It’s just going to the banks to help keep them solvent. 

At the same time, the economy is tanking and the money available for taxes is shrinking rapidly. No tax increase in the world is going to even begin to raise enough money to pay off these bills. It’s quite likely, that the result will be a bankrupt federal government. Bottom line: the government will have not choice but to radically trim it’s size and cut spending - something we conservatives have been praying for since the beginning of time.

Do you really think that an Obama administration is going to be able to rollout a trillion dollar economic stimulus program and provide health care for all? How can that be done when all of the available money is going go towards paying off trillions of dollars in debt?

So in other words, Bush, and certain Republicans in power may be thinking that the best way to kill socialism is to push it full-bore rather than continuing a futile fight against the gradual increase in social programs we’ve seen over the past 70 years or so. This way, socialism will kill the economy before people can get used to it, and thereby cause people to reject it, suddenly and utterly. 

Of course, it’s a risky proposition, in that it could create an environment that seriously hurts the people and causes them to embrace even more dangerous and radical ideas. So, we’ll have to see how this plays out (and do a LOT of praying to God).

My suspicion is that an Obama administration will actually be forced to be more conservative that any administration since before the New Deal. Obama will be forced to cut the size of government, but he won’t be willing to go all the way and provide the necessary, brutal (on the government) tax cuts and deregulation that will truly stimulate a dead economy. So he’ll have to govern from the right, and get blamed for it by liberals, as well as get blamed for the consequences of not being conservative enough. In the meantime we the people get to actually see some real reduction in the size of government. 

This will at least provide us conservatives with some relief in what may otherwise be some very difficult and unhappy times.   However, at the end of the day, I think this is a very dangerous game to play, and I think that if this scenerio is true, it's all the more important for us conservatives to be more active than ever in promoting our values of fiscal responsiblity and limited goverment.

Many of you may have seen or heard about the situation in Chicago where workers are taking over a factory that had to be shutdown suddenly because the company couldn’t afford to pay the bills.

At least this is the current news story. (I always recommend waiting two weeks before forming an opinion on the news because it takes a while for all the facts to come out. More on that idea in a future post.)

Regardless of the details surrounding the causes of this situation, my gut tells me that what we are seeing here is just the very beginning of a massive tsunami of sudden shutdowns of companies and businesses due to the credit crunch and economic slowdown. 

I hope I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that we’d better get ready….it’s going to be a very, very, bumpy ride….

For the 5^th Christmas in a row, Target stores continues its ban on Salvation Army ringers. Never mind that Target does give a substantial sum of money to the SA. The whole point of the ringers is to motivate us shoppers to freely give our OWN spare change to the poor and needy as we so choose. I like the ringers because they help spread a little bit of the Christmas spirit of giving, not just to each other, but to those who are truly needy. We’ve even got a tradition here in Northern Colorado where someone always puts a Gold coin in one of the buckets each year in secret, and the news media was always trying to figure out who it was.

But Target Stores banned the ringers in 2004 because they felt that if they allowed one group to solicit at their stores, they’d have to allow other groups as well. Never mind the fact that they are a private business and should have the right to decide who can solicit and who can’t for any reason they choose. The bottom line is that they are too spineless to fight for what’s right and stand up for what has become an American tradition. So, they just decided to banish solicitations altogether.

I’m tired of the spinelessness of corporate America. Why couldn’t Target just stand up and say that “the Salvation Army ringers are an American tradition, and we fully support the assistance they lend to the needy by allowing them the unique and sole privilege of soliciting donations at our stores.” 

So, as a result of their cowardly actions, I avoid shopping at Target if at all possible. I’ve only been to Target a couple of times over the past 5 years, and at this point, I don’t think there’s anything I would want, that Target has, that I couldn’t get from another store.

It’s up to you as to where you want to shop, but I prefer to grace Wal-Mart stores. They’re have affordable goods and services, and they have products that are just as good as Target’s, for a reasonable price. And they’ve at least had enough spine to allow the Salvation Army ringers at their doors, to spread a little sense of giving and take a little of the raw commercialism out of the Christmas.