Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Can I Get a Witness?

Jesse Taylor says:

The Washington Post details today conservative concerns over the expansion of federal government under Bush. The typical objections are kindly trotted out, paraded around the sparsely populated arena, and trotted back in to the stables to a smattering of lazy claps and overheard questions about why hot dogs cost three dollars.

It's a nice show, but the core of Republican attitudes on the federal government are less an ideological opposition to the expansion of government power than an ideological opposition to the expansion of liberalism....

It's the decimation of personal control, the wholehearted embrace of the federal government's power to remove power from the individual. It's not about helping, supporting through hard times, ensuring a basic standard of living. It's about restriction, whether through fear, judicial fiat, or simple gross paternalism. It has nothing to do with the liberal embrace of the government's power to ensure and expand opportunity - the conservative ideal of government declares that its only power is to restrict rights...and they're perfectly fine with that.

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