Sredzkistraße

How Dysfunction Helps the GOP

Thanks to John for bringing this to my attention – an op-ed journal in the Wall Street Journal entitled “How Dysfunction Helps the GOP: The party says its own mistakes prove Government can’t work.”

It begins:

‘Remember the $400 hammer? How ’bout that $600 toilet seat?” asks a Conservatives for Patients’ Rights TV commercial criticizing President Barack Obama’s health-care plan. “Seems when Congress gets involved, things just cost more.”

As it happens, I do remember the incident of the $436 hammer, the one that made headlines back in 1984. And while it may “seem” in hazy retrospect as though it showed how “things just cost more” once those silly liberals in Congress get started, what the hammer episode actually illustrated was a very different sort of ripoff. The institution that paid so very much for that hammer was President Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon. A private-sector contractor was the party that was pleased to take the Pentagon’s money. And it was a liberal Democrat in the House of Representatives, also known as “Congress,” who publicized the pricey hardware to the skies.

And ends with these thoughts:

A government that works, some conservatives fear, is dangerous stuff. It gives people ideas. Universal health care isn’t just a bad idea for their buddies in the insurance business; it’s a gateway drug to broader state involvement in the economy and hence a possible doomsday scenario for conservatism itself. As two fellows of the Ethics and Public Policy Center fretted in the Weekly Standard in May, “health care is the key to public enmeshment in ballooning welfare states, and passage of ObamaCare would deal a heavy blow to the conservative enterprise in American politics.”

On the other hand, government fails constantly when conservatives run it because making it work would be, for many of those conservatives, to traduce the very laws of nature. Besides, as we can now see, bungling Katrina recovery or Pentagon procurement pays conservatives huge dividends. It gives them potent ammunition to use when the liberals have returned and are proposing another one of their grand schemes to reform health care.

Well-written, concise and to-the-point – definitely worth reading.