Thursday, November 13, 2008

Republicans to Search for New Mythology

[Kudos to Joe Scarborough, of MSNBC's Morning Joe, for pointing out that while Barack Obama and the Democrats are working to save the nation, the Republicans are still focused just on trying to save the Republican Party.]


The Republican Mythology Defined

Over the Past Twenty-Eight Years, since the 1980 Reactionary Revolution, the Republican Party has pinned its star to the Libertarian-like hypothesis of government as problem, such that government must be kept as small as possible....

....and that markets should be kept as unrestrained as possible....

....and that free markets encourage competition and growth....

....and that the efficiency of markets reins in the otherwise-inevitable
bubbles and recessions and depressions
that wreak havoc on the economy of a country.

Oh, yes: and that taxes must be driven lower and lower, to stimulate the economy and produce consistently increasing tax revenues....

All This “Voodoo Economics” Has Formed the Mythology of the Republican Party for longer than many Americans can remember.


Now, the Mythology Has Been Exposed

The American Markets Are in Ruin.
None of this is news.

The “Free Market” Turns out to Cost about $12,000,000,000,000 more than the Republicans, including former-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, thought.

The Perennially Lowered Taxes Turned out to Be a Tax Deferral, not a tax decrease.

In the Words of Alan Greenspan, the Republican side of things is discombobulated into “a state of shocked disbelief.”

The Arguments for Lower Taxes and Higher Tax Revenues, and unfettered and efficient markets–these arguments are over.


The Free-Market, Low-Tax Mythology of the Republican Party Is Dead.


As Long as the Underlying Premises Remain Null and Void
—and so long as the failure of those premises remains unacknowledged—the Republican Party will remain stymied in its efforts at “trying to save the Republican Party.”

The Republicans Just Need to Go Back to the Drawing Board and figure out something completely different. They need an entirely new way of looking at things.

And While the Republican Party Is Kept Busy saving its own ATM card–

–the Democrats and the rest of “the Real America” will continue paying off all that debt, and otherwise working to save the country.


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