Krugman had a gem of philosophy inside his column:
Let’s start with that red folder. Assuming that the folder contained something other than scrap paper, is the planned response to a hurricane a state secret? Are we worried that tropical storm systems will discover our weak points? Are we fighting a Global War on Weather?This is something I was discussing with a friend on Friday. Why do we vote in a party who has the following talking points about running the very offices they campaign for:
Actually, that’s not quite as funny as it sounds. Some observers have pointed out that daily briefings on preparations for Gustav, which should be coming from the Federal Emergency Management Agency — which is, you know, supposed to manage emergencies — have been coming, instead, from the U.S. military’s Northern Command.
It’s not hard to see why. Top positions at FEMA are no longer held by obviously unqualified political hacks and cronies. But a recent report by the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security said that the agency has made only “limited progress” in the area of “mission assignments” — that is, in its ability to coordinate the response to a crisis. So FEMA still isn’t up to carrying out its principal task.
That’s no accident. FEMA’s degradation, from one of the government’s most admired agencies to a laughingstock, wasn’t an isolated event; it was the result of the G.O.P.’s underlying philosophy. Simply put, when the government is run by a political party committed to the belief that government is always the problem, never the solution, that belief tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Key priorities are neglected; key functions are privatized; and key people, the competent public servants who make government work, either leave or are driven out.
Why are libertarian ideas important? Because of their influence on the Republican Party. They form the ideological basis for the Reagan/Gingrich/Bush revolution. The Republicans have taken the libertarian "Government is Bad" horse and ridden far with it:I guess they'd say that they are running to dismantle the government in order to save the country. Somehow, that just hasn't worked very well. The modern world demands that government provide quality services to citizens, and you can't defy the economic certainties involved here: cut a program's funding, and there are real losses of quality and scope.
* Reagan's "Government is the problem"
* Phil Gramm's contention that the country's "economic crisis" and "moral crisis" were due to "the explosion of government"
* Talk radio hosts' advocacy of armed resistance to "jack-booted government thugs"
* Dole's 1996 campaign, advancing the notion that taxes were "Your Money" being taken from you
* Gingrich's Contract with America (welfare cuts, tax cuts, limitations on corporations' responsibility and on the government's ability to regulate them)
* Dick Armey's comment that Medicare (medical aid for the elderly) is "a program I would have no part of in a free world"
* Bush's tax cuts, intended not only to reward the rich but to "starve the beast", in Grover Norquist's words: to create a permanent deficit as a dangerous ploy to reduce social spending
* Jeb Bush's hope that the Florida state government buildings would one day be empty
* Intellectual support for attacks on the quality of working life in this county and for undoing the New Deal
