Just stumbled into this one, “a five point plan for turning things around for conservatives. It won’t happen.” But it’s pretty good, particularly the last segment:
Like It Or Not, Government Is Part Of The Free Market
Regardless of who first noted that democracies can exist only “until the citizens discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury,” the fact remains that Americans have discovered it. And therefore, once enough voters become convinced the Government can provide a product, they will flock to buy it. If some candidate offers a product (or the illusion of one) and enough people want it, the only way to prevent him from getting elected is to offer something better. In other words, competition.
“We can’t compete against free?” Take it to someone who cares. “Free” is on the table, and if you don’t beat it somehow, you will lose. Unfair? So what? The Universe doesn’t deal in fair. The universe has a perverse habit of posing unsolvable problems with mutually incompatible constraints.
Want to blunt the power of unions? Offer workers better protection than unions offer. Want to weaken the teachers’ unions? The biggest single driver of teacher unions is that sacred cow of conservatism, local control of the schools. When teachers can teach interesting and provocative material in class and be sure the administration will back them against dimwit parents, then conservatives might just catch a break among teachers.
Want to keep government regulations to a minimum? Have safety and environmental practices so squeaky clean that government regulation would be seen as a step down.
The problems with health care are obvious. It’s increasingly too expensive for employers. Insurance mires patients and doctors in paperwork. Insurers and drug companies want returns on their investments. Want the government out of health care? Come up with something better. People who claim to be brilliant enough to know that biologists are wrong about evolution and climatologists are wrong about climate change ought to find this a piece of cake.
Want freedom of choice in schools? The time to set that up was before there was a movement to create public schools. If every town had an affordable private school, there would have been no market for public schools.
Read the whole thing, as they say.
