The Republican leadership and their advisers are confirming Murray Rothbard's doubts. Writing in the Washington Post, Rothbard noted the vast ideological divide between the voters and those who control the Republican Congress. His prediction: the leadership will defend the old order of government control even as its legitimacy is unraveling. The revolution was betrayed, he said, even before the Republicans took control.
The two-to-one vote in favor of California's Prop. 187 is a milestone in the battle against the welfare state. It is a victory that will help reclaim individual liberty against centralized power.
The election of 1994 was an unprecedented and smashing electoral expression of the popular revolution that had been building up for many months: a massive repudiation of President Clinton, the Clintonian Democratic Party, their persons and all of their works. It was a fitting follow up to the string of revolutions against government and socialism in the former states and satellites of the Soviet Union. The anti-government revolution has come home at last.
The phrase "End Welfare As We Know It" is a classic Clinton evasion. It sounds bold and "neoliberal" at first, but on close examination it collapses into nothingness. Almost any change in a policy qualifies as ending it "as we know it." It could mean cuts. It could also mean more spending and redistribution.
Did 12 years of Reagan-Bush corrupt the Right? "Whatever they might say in their after-dinner speeches or in their op-ed pieces," writes former Wall Street Journal editorialist David Frum in his new book Dead Right, conservatives have "effectively thrown in the towel on government spending" and given up the war against big government.
Think of the U.S. Postal Service as a Soviet planning bureaucracy. The P.S. causes severe and systemic dislocations, imposes a terrible burden on enterprise and the citizenry, and is sometimes tyrannical. Also like Soviet planning, the longer it lasts, the worse it gets. It is doomed to fail and be dismantled.
American government, we are told, is notable for its stability. And so it seems, at least on the surface. But stability over a long period, as the Russian tsars could tell us, is no guarantee of permanence. And the tsars fell very suddenly after ruling far longer than the U.S. government's two centuries.
Last March, I laid out my "Thirty Day Plan" for de-socializing America. But I didn't scrap all of big government; now it's time for more:
Gather round, taxpayers! This is the moment you've been waiting for! Time to calculate your Peace Dividend! Now that our archenemy, the Soviet Union, is disintegrating into throat-lozenge-sized independent republics with names like "Huzzubegonia," whose primary military activity is knocking over statues of Lenin, we don't need a Defense Department anymore. This means that you, the taxpayers, MAY ALREADY HAVE WON BILLIONS OF DOLLARS! SO DON'T THROW AWAY THIS NEWSLETTER, because we are ABOUT TO TELL YOU THE SIZE OF YOUR PEACE DIVIDEND! Get ready! Better lean close to the page so you won't miss it! That's it—just a little closer... here it comes...
