The article is seriously flawed. It fails to mention that capital accumulation requires a massive publicly subsidized physical and legal infrastructure. It fails to mention that big business craves big government interference. Banks crave FDIC insurance (aka big government). Drug companies crave patent protection (aka big government). Big Oil craves the military protection of its supply chains. American transnationals crave global military stabilization so that capital can flow unobstructed to the cheapest resources and labor markets. Profit in the Southwest exists because Big Government infrastructure (see Hoover dam). Goods are transported across the country more efficiently because of the interstate system (see big government. And let's not talk about all the energy grids, and roads, dams, ditches, sewers, and water delivery systems supplied by government infrastructure projects. Does the average rightwing voter know how many public subsidies have gone into, say, the creation of Manhattan? or the making rural America? IS FOX News this powerful?) And what about commercial aviation (-study the relationship between Boeing and government). And what about the 80's consumer electronics boom (-study the Cold War Pentagon and NASA budgets which produced so much of the technology that found its way into mass consumption. And let's not about the evolution of WWII war manufacturing into domestic consumption industries). Commerce depends heavily on Big Government. (The Rightwing voter has been lied to)
The author of the article should keep quiet about his affiliation with the Reagan library. Doesn't he know that the Reagan War on Drugs created a context for federal intervention in the states that is completely antithetical to the libertarian ethos? Or what about the bailouts given to the S&Ls? Has he ever been to CATO's website? If he had, he would have learned that the Reagan's chapter in the Cold War grew Big Government more than anything this side of LBJ. (Rightwing voters have no idea how much postwar globalism, i.e., the creation, maintenance, and defense of the global market system, has lead to massive growth of Washington's power. Nor are they told how much National Security is
used to grow the centralized power of the state. The Homeland Security department is the largest, most powerful, most non-transparent, most expensive bureaucracy created in history, yet the Right says nothing about it. Why? Because Forbes and Talk Radio never mentions this stuff. The Rightwing does not get it: you can't grow government in order to ensure total safety. Life is dangerous and a Big Nanny Government cannot protect you. We would all love total safety, but, unlike Republicans, we don't want to grow government in order to get there. Why? Because we believe that government will not only waste our money, but will likely create bigger problems)
Let's not forget when Reagan stopped enforcing the Sherman Act, thus paving the way for an era of mega-mergers, leaving us with too-big-to-fail financial firms who raped this country's future with a criminal derivatives market before being bailed out by the public...
People actually take seriously articles like the one linked by the OP. They live inside a bubble where they hear the same stories about keeping the money they earned. But here is what they never hear: profit makers love Big government. This is why Washington has been turned into a lobbying kingdom. If Big Government didn't exist, than Big Business would invent it in order to socialize its costs (subsidies) and absorb its losses (bailouts).
Attention Rightwing. Please stop growing government. We can no longer afford you.
A hidden world, growing beyond control | washingtonpost.com
(and stop lying about how you are the party of small government. Stop reading Forbes and watching FOX. You are being lied to. Everyone knows that capital is heavily dependent on a dynamic interventionist state sector)
