Prestopundit (aka Greg Ransom) had a funny word to describe, based on a article by Will Wilkinson, how several left-liberal pundits including Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and Harold Meyerson are describing President Bush: Murray Rothbard with a Texas accent.
Krugman decried the alleged “ideological hostility to the very idea of using government” of the Bush administration, Meyerson attacked its alleged “economic libertarianism” and Dowd its “limited government”, all three blaming Bush’s alleged libertarian ideology for the problems with the rescue operation in New Orleans.
Of course, government spending has only increased 32% under the first 4 years of the Bush administration (For FY 2005 I’ve added the 7% increase of the first 10 months)compared with the 14% increase under the first 4 years of the Clinton administration, so we clearly see how dogmatically libertarian and hostile towards the use of government the Bush administration has been.
Bush has been more like LBJ with a Texas accent–oh wait I forgot, LBJ did have a Texas accent (Funny, btw, that Texas presidents are so high-spending when Texas, in its state politics, is relatively low tax.)
It can’t be easy right now to be either a partisan Democrat who loves big government (like the three aforementioned pundits) or a partisan Republican who truly wants small government, now that Bush is expanding government faster than ever. Both of these types seem to respond by denying reality and falsely claiming that Bush stands for limited government.
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Have Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and Harold Meyerson ever read Rothbard? And as Stefan pointed out, government is growing faster under Bush than at any time in recent memory. Their attempts to associate Bush with Rothbard and Libertarianism are factually incorrect at the core, and nothing but politically motivated rubbish.
he isn’t even a conservative who would keep expanding the military and funding for highways and R&D but against a welfare state. he’s for increasing everything!
This is obviously how the left intends to distance itself from having government per se be blamed: ignore the facts regarding Big Government Republicanism (the true Lincoln legacy as so brilliantly articulated by Clyde Wilson in this recent LRC piece: http://www.lewrockwell.com/wilson/wilson20.html) and blame it all on Bush’s SUPPOSED belief in limited government.
Have they no shame? No more than their neocon counterparts, the question being whether the people will see through it in time to prepare themselves for the reckoning day that will arrive all the sooner for the denial thereof.
These people are seriously disturbed. They can’t even tell night from day. It’s hard to imagine one policy or action of this administration that Rothbard would have agreed with (patriot act, war on terror, Iraq you name it). It would have been wonderful if he could have been able to right in the free market about current events, since his atricles about the Reagon, Bush sr. and Clinton administration were red hot. Of course we have great people writing today, but the man was a genius and it’s sad that his name gets used in this way by these so called “economisits”.
It needs to be emphasized that the phrase “Murray Rothbard with a Texas accent” does not come from Krugman, Dowd, or Meyerson, but from Greg Ransom. Krugman certainly does not view Bush this way with any consistency. Elsewhere he points out that Bush is less ideological than he pretends to be. (See my comment to the Ransom post linked at the top of the first paragraph.)
compared to what liberals really want, yes Bush is a Rothbard from Texas. ha you think you have it so bad now?
While Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and Harold Meyerson did not use the phrase “Murray Rothbard with a Texas accent” to describe Bush, from what Stefan has quoted it is clear that they are attempting to link limited government, if not Libertarianism, with Bush. And as Bush’s actions as President starkly illustrate, these attempts are completely erroneous.
it is a perverse sort of logic that can use such a colossal government failure to argue for… more government. All levels of government had plans for major emergencies (especially after september 11th), and they all failed miserably. Krugman wiggles around this obvious problem by blaming it on “ideological hostility” to government solutions… a nebulous assertion at best, and one that is difficult to find evidence for, at least since September 11th 2001.
Krugman complains about Brown, apparently ignoring the fact that his appointment was confirmed by the Senate in 2002… another government failure.
He concludes,
… and the Americans who fared the worst were those who relied on government to rescue them. Again, it is surprising that this can be made into an argument for more government.
In Dr. Krugman’s world (and Dowd’s and countless others) government can only succeed; failures are not to be counted against government. They are to be written off as the work of a few ideological bad apples. It is hard to know how to respond to such thinking.
Every now and again I see the idea of a left-libertarian alliance bubbling up around here and at LewRockwell.com. Stefan’s post is a useful reminder that the idea remains a bad one.
HZ: I agree. Many times i have said the same thing to myself in response to establishment points of view: “It is hard to know how to respond to such thinking.” To me it is like: how does one rebut the logic that one plus one sometimes does not equal two. It almost seems a no-win argument. If you do prevail, well, it should have been obvious from the start anyways. If you don’t prevail, what a brutal exercise in futility the discussion was.
A great story from 1987, about what the Army Corps of Engineers has done to the Mississippi Delta – or more importantly, what it has done to the characters of the people there.
What struck me most of all as he talked was his evident and inherent conviction that a community [Morgan City] can have a right to exist — to rise, expand, and prosper—in the middle of one of the most theatrically inundated floodplains in the world … “It’s the nation’s problem, and we are only the victims here of a lot of things that does happen here that are imposed upon us …”
The Control of Nature: Atchafalaya
To my mind, this is the biggest Commons Tragedy in America, and maybe in the whole world (other than the entire nation of North Korea).
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