Innovative Conservative Thinkers

Dick Armey. Great.

This is one of those examples of "thoughtful" conservatism based on supposedly "Jeffersonian" principles that makes all kinds of ludicrous assumptions. Particlarly the assumption that

Government can only expand its scope of power and authority at the expense of the citizen.

This is based on the either-or assumption that if government does anything at all, it is automatically at the expense of the freedoms of the American citizen. Thus, any and all government programs or laws or whatever are automatically tyrannical. Any government program, no matter how high-minded, is thus a violation of the principles of the founding fathers, true conservatism which is the natural state of being, blah blah blah blah blah, and thus needs to be curtailed altogether.

Whatever. That is a way of looking at it, I suppose. Not a good way, but a way. Another way of looking at it is that the American government and the American people fashion an agreement as to whether the government will expand or contract, based on whatever conglomeration of interests can tolerate one another enough to get along and cooperate. The way we decide such things as a nation is based on voting. If we want the governemnt to do more things in various ways, we vote for candidates who say they will. When we decide otherwise, we vote accordingly. It's not a perfect system, but for the most part, it works amazingly well. Unless, of course, you believe in theories of, say, a unitary executive who can do whatever he wants without answering to written laws , and who can then, say, spy on American citizens without warrants even though most Americans don't believe he has this authority. Or unless you desire to clamp down on who can and cannot vote, through, maybe, trumped up charges of voter fraud as seen by politicized agents of government institutions. If something like that were to happen, then certainly the expansion of the government would be at the expense of the people, because they could not effectively react to it excesses. Unfortunately for Mr. Armey, he happens to be a member in very good standing with the American political party who have tried exactly these things.

Armey's simplistic "Governement equals Red Tyranny" version of freedom versus government comes up short when he applies it to health care, his chosen example with this post. Simply put, health care isn't a choice. I need it. And since I need it, I have to pay for it somehow. This is only a "choice" in the Libertarian, anarcho-capitalism, "true-conservative" meaning of the word, wherein I can "choose" to be fired from a job and lose my insurance; or "choose" not to have enough money to pay for insurance on my own; or "choose" to curl up in a ball and die. By any rational measure, these aren't really "choices" at all. Since it's accepted economic practice to raise interest rates as a mean of increasing unemployment to control inflation, which of course might leave me and many others out of work and thus out of insurance, in many ways I am already not free to choose the manner of my health care coverage. Given all of this, I might actually welcome government "interference" of some kind to foot the bill for health care. This doesn't threaten my freedoms at all. At worst, it is freedom-neutral-it doesn't affect my freedoms any more or less negatively or positively than the current system; and it could actually increase my choices in other ways.

If this is one of the leading voices of the conservative "movement," then the Republican party is even more vacuous and listless than I thought.