Pinched from Brad DeLong…

Jeff Frankels Weblog | Views on the Economy and the World: [F]or the last 40 years, rhetoric notwithstanding, Republican presidents have pursued policies… farther removed from the ideal of good… economics than have Democratic presidents. This is especially true… [of] the textbook version…. But… it applies even to the “conservative economics” version that puts priority simply on small government. The criteria underlying this generalization about Republican presidents are:

1. Growth in the size of the government, as measured by employment and spending.
2. Lack of fiscal discipline, as measured by budget deficits.
3. Lack of commitment to price stability, as measured by pressure on the Fed for easier monetary policy when politically advantageous.
4. Departures from free trade.
5. Use of government powers to protect and subsidize favored special interests (such as agriculture and the oil and gas sector, among others)….   

Republican presidents have since 1971 indulged in these five departures from “conservatism” to a greater extent than Democratic presidents. The name I would give to this set of departures… is neither “liberal” nor “conservative” but, rather, “illiberal”…

To which DeLong Adds:

Real conservatives take note: you will never have a party until you kill the Republican Party, and replace it with something new. You should start now, for all of our sakes.

Were there ever any "real" conservatives?  Well…I guess Goldwater was one.  But here’s the problem:  Real or not, this is what conservative ideology gets you.  Small government means no regulation of big corporations, of big money.  When big corporations, and big money become more powerful then government, they will simply turn government to their own ends and that leads right back to "big government", just not big government in the people’s interest.  So you end up with all the points Frankels makes above, even if you started from a sincere belief in "small government" ideology.  When money becomes more powerful then the law, money inevitably becomes the law.

So.  No fiscal discipline because big business doesn’t want discipline, it wants its profits and it wants them now.  Fed monetary policy becomes whatever big business wants it to be at whatever moment in time it wants it to be that.  Free trade is out because if big business hates anything more then regulation it’s competition.  And…special interests?  When you have government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich, the common folk are the special interest group.  And when big business takes over the nation’s news media, it gets kinda hard to find out just how deeply the corruption has taken root.  All you see, is the spectacular meltdowns.  Iraq.  Katrina.  The Dot-Com bust.  The Housing bust.  How big was that deficit again?

That’s what small government ideology gets you.  When money becomes more powerful then the law, money becomes the law.  Anyone who seriously thought (as I did once) that the way to keep government honest and the economy strong was to cut government down to the bone should be, after decades of republican dismantling of the New Deal, if they are honest, thoroughly disabused of that notion. A government that is smaller then money will never resist the corrupting power of big money.  That is what we are seeing now.  The moment, the instant the regulatory boundaries were taken away, corruption began running wild.  Money does not self regulate.

Some of the people pushing the small government ideology didn’t reckon on that.  But probably, most of them did.  They talked up free markets, but they weren’t interested in freedom.  They wanted the money.  It’s easier to get when the law can be bought off.  You keep a market free the same way you keep the streets safe to walk at night.  It takes a rule of law, backed by impartial justice.  There is no safety, let alone freedom, where the police work for the crooks, upholding laws that were written by crooks, for crooks.

And one more thing: morals.  The people crafting the laws we all live by need to be people who understand that stealing is wrong.  That lying is wrong.  That cheating is wrong.  Wrong because sooner or later the bills come due, and while Jesus may forgive you, reality is a hard assed motherfucker.

In China now, they’re undergoing an upheaval in the baby formula market.  Children are dying after being fed baby formula tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.  It wasn’t an accident.  It wasn’t carelessness.  It wasn’t neglect.  It was greed.  Melamine, a chemical used in plastics, contains a concentration of proteins which make it useful for hiding the fact that the milk in baby formula has been diluted.  Profits are always higher, when there is less product in the product. 

Morals.  Values.  Greed is good…remember?