Let's see if I can find the three articles I read today.
Here's one: Morlocks vs. Libertarians by Vin Suprynowicz from LewRockwell.com:
Yes, the foreign-policy deference of Mr. Kerry (and his collaborationist wing of the Democratic Party) to France and the U.N. is pathetic. Yes, left to their own devices (but there's a substantial caveat, given the relentless inertial guidance systems of the Washington bureaucracy) the Kerry crew would probably accelerate job-destroying business and "environmental" regulation and freedom-destroying gun bans, while "taxing the rich" in ways unseen since Leningrad, 1921.
Whereas Mr. Bush - freed to be as bold as he likes by Republican control of both houses of Congress - had worked over the past four years to restore our limited, constitutional government ... how?
....
Have the Republicans even gotten around to keeping Ronald Reagan's 1980 promise to close down the federal Departments of Energy and Education - let alone Agriculture, Health and Human Services?
Are they waiting till they control the White House and every seat in Congress? Do you really think they'd do it, even then?
Have they shut down the redistributionist Roosevelt-Johnson Ponzi schemes known as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Repealed the crushing slavery of the income tax? Repealed a single one of the thousands of unconstitutional federal infringements of the 2nd Amendment?
....
Just the opposite. Bush lied to Congress about the astronomical cost of his new "free drugs for seniors" handout - "browbeating Congress into enacting the biggest expansion of the welfare state since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society," reports Jim Bovard in his fine new book "The Bush Betrayal." He "signed the most exorbitant farm bill in history in 2002, bilking taxpayers for $180 billion to rain benefits on millionaire landowners and other deserving mendicants."
Bush actually has the nerve to say he's fighting the War on Terror by further bloating the AmeriCorps "paid volunteer" program, under which "AmeriCorps members busy themselves putting on puppet shows to persuade three-year-olds of the value of smoke alarms." The No Child Left Behind Act? "Perhaps Bush's biggest domestic fraud," Mr. Bovard says, leading "many states to 'dumb down' academic standards, using bureaucratic racketeering to avoid harsh federal sanctions."
I won't quote it all, but there's this on tax reform:
Meantime, what of these other "conservatives" of the right? Their "tax reform" schemes reveal that all they really intend is to "improve the efficiencies of collection," in ways which are "revenue neutral" (not reducing Massa's total cotton crop), shifting the well-funded levers of state power into new hands (theirs) – usually in order to "make this a Christian nation" by more rigorously arresting and imprisoning those who exercise their God-given freedom to engage in self-medication, birth control (yes, there were places in this country where they tried to jail people for distributing birth control information to married couples, less than 50 years ago), and/or fornication.
Vin's writing is like an Air Cav assault on the Fourth of July. Keeps ya awake.
Here's a piece at The Future of Freedom Foundation that's kind of more-of-the-same (minus the fireworks):
How Conservative Is George W. Bush? by Anthony Gregory
Bush has expanded the welfare state and increased discretionary spending at a faster rate than any president since Lyndon Johnson. His Medicare bill alone should have disgusted enough conservatives sufficiently to refuse to vote for him. The fact that the Bush administration deliberately misled fellow Republicans in Congress about the cost of the bill - a misdeed that would have surely, and justifiably, yielded scorn and wrath from conservatives had Clinton been the perpetrator - should alone convince Americans that this administration is neither politically honest nor fiscally responsible.
Bush's trade policies have been quite protectionist by modern standards. Moreover, farm subsidies under Bush have made Clinton look like a Scrooge with tax dollars.
Bush signed the horrid McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill, admitting that some of the provisions were unconstitutional. Now he complains that the law doesn't go far enough in restricting the political speech of independent political organizations.
Though the assault-weapons ban has expired, it is no credit to the administration. Bush expressed willingness to revive the ban - whereas he has shown nothing but contempt in his stonewalling of efforts to arm airline pilots.
And now he's calling for free government health clinics in every town, free health care for all disadvantaged youth, and massive welfare to Americans to help them purchase homes.
Of course, this doesn’t even get into Bush's war policies, both at home and abroad, that many conservatives have had the good sense to question. But even if we assume Bush to be an angel as far as the war on terror is concerned - even if we assume his role as a strong war president compensates for all the socialism he has pushed through - we see just how much big government and spending some Republicans are ultimately willing to tolerate: any amount. No matter how much Bush increases spending, panders to voters, assaults the free market - as long as there's a war on, and as long as a Republican is in charge, we must open the floodgates to infinite government spending.
...
And the money quote, "Would conservatives feel the same way if Al Gore had become president? If Gore, who unlike most Democrats voted in favor of Gulf War I, had gone to war with both Afghanistan and Iraq, would his war leadership automatically exempt him from criticism for his domestic welfare spending, the way it appears to have done in the case of Bush?"
And Capitalism Magazine has analysis of the faulty thinking of the Administration:
Opposing Platonic Conservatism: A Matter of Values by John Lewis, Ph.D.
Objectivism recognizes that the meaning of an idea is the facts it refers to in reality. A value is a fact that is understood in relation to human life. "A value," said Ayn Rand, "is that which one acts to gain and/or keep"--it is not an idea divorced from action. For example, men are free when the government protects their rights; this is what freedom means....
But this view of values contrasts utterly with the views of the neoconservative team behind Mr. Bush. They see values as ideas from a higher reality, whether religious or secular, and then applied imperfectly to this world.... "Freedom" becomes an idea from intuition, or a dictate of the almighty, that can be applied only imperfectly in the real world. This is not necessarily religious faith, but also "common sense"--stuff that all of us just know, as I was once told by a conservative atheist.
The chasm is not between their values and their actions to preserve them, but rather between their values and reality.
The neoconservative movement is the explicit inculcation of Platonism into American politics. The main figure here is Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the intellectual force behind the neoconservatives and founder of the only serious conservative academic movement. Straussians include Paul Wolfowitz, William Bennett, Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, Richard Perle, and Abram Shulsky, Director of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans....
The neoconservatives have become the philosophical alternative to the religious right in the Republican Party. This is precisely the danger that support for Mr. Bush represents. His re-election will strenthen their attempts to fill the void created by the nihilistic left. This will hasten the spread of ideas antithetical to a rational world-view....
Followers of Strauss are united by the notion that ideas--especially political principles--are in essence pure theory, and cannot be directly applied in reality. As Strauss wrote in his book Natural Right and History, "Prudence ["practical" reasoning, how you deal with the world of men] and 'this lower world' cannot be seen without some knowledge of 'the higher world'--without genuine theorie." Theorie is the abstract idea, of which the real world in which we live is at best a shadowy reflection.
According to Strauss, ancient philosophical texts, such as Plato and Aristotle--the source of political wisdom--have esoteric and exoteric meanings. The former is a hidden dimension or code reserved for academics (or a Pentagon clique); the latter is what average people understand and act on in this world. Every theory, idea and principle includes the proviso that its use in the world cannot be perfect; it must be negotiated. To compromise a principle, in this view, is not an error; it is inherent in principles as such. Conflicts between theory and practice are in the nature of reality.
The ancient answer to Plato was Aristotle, the philosopher who explicitly denied such a higher reality; he said that there was only one world for us to understand.
....
I am indeed among those who, to cite one writer's criticism, "have even concluded that the effect [of repeatedly affirming a "correct idea" while acting against it] is to destroy the meaning of the good principle." This occurs because the concrete referents to the principle change, and the false alternative replaces the true.
So, then, it's better to vote for the candidate who states socialist beliefs and acts on them than one who destroys the People's understanding of - or belief in the sincerity of - the concepts underpinning Western Civilization by espousing them while acting to restrict speech (McCain-Feingold), habeas corpus, property rights (primarily via Drug War seizures), the right to self-defense (as mentioned above, the useless "assault-weapons" ban expired, no thanks to Bush--haven't seen any carnage yet, BTW).
This is a reaction to the things that weren't said in the debates. You won't hear a "liberal" bitching about them. But wait 'til they get their hands on the reins of the Leviathan Bush has created. Why don't all these big-government lovers ever consider that electoral victory is a fleeting thing in a democracy, and one day your political enemies are going to get their shot?
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