For several decades now, the American public has been subjected to the Conservative-agenda-driven idea of Bad Government.
Conservatives and Teabaggers and Libertarians found themselves aroused when Reagan uttered in his 1981 inaugural address
In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.
They again cheered seven years later when he said:
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"
Conservatives would have you believe:
- Government is bad.
- Government is wasteful.
- You would be better off without government.
- America was founded so that rich people could buy and hoard shit.
- Worker's wages, safety, quality of life don't matter. Unions are anathema to Democracy.
- America was founded so that businessmen could maximize their profits no matter how they did it.
- People who have power deserve it. Moreover, God wants them to enjoy wealth.
- We are not the stewards of the environment or dependent on it; instead, it is there for the exploitation by those who have the means to extract the resources and burden us the people with the waste.
- Consumer protection is government interference in the rights of businessmen to maximize their bottom line and is tantamount to harrassment.
Thomas Frank wrote in The Wrecking Crew:
A more businesslike government is, on the surface, a goal to which nearly everyone in Washington aspires. Greater efficiency and less waste are objectives with obvious appeal, and every few years it occurs to someone that there ought to be a study or hearings or a report on how government should be run more like a business. Each of these efforts has supposedly been politically neutral, just an innocent search for better results, but each one has in fact carried a powerful political charge arising from the basic fallacy that government is not a business. It does not seek profits; its employees cannot take tips; it answers to the people, not to a small clique of owners.
The granddaddy of all these efforts was the 1984 President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, usually called the "Grace Commission" after its chairman, the swaggering right-wing industrialist J. Peter Grace. What was meant by Private Sector was "top executives"; the Grace Commission included among its 161 members exactly one representative of organized labor. The commission was charged with rooting out waste and inefficiency in federal spending as a means to bring down the by-then enormous federal deficit. It proposed the mass privatization and out-sourcing of federal operations, on the grounds that business was automatically and in almost every situation more efficient than government, but otherwise its deficit-reduction ideas were generally ignored. As a political symbol, however, the Grace Commision's significance was enormous. For years, government had snooped around in the affairs of business, but now it was business's turn to investigate government, to deplore its incompetence and tell the bureaucrats how to put their own house in order.
The softer, Democratic version of these ideas came in a 1992 book called Reinventing Government, which promised an "American Perestroika" through the exciting-sounding concept of "entrepreneurial government." Freedom had toppled the Communist dictatorships, and how "empowerment" would sweep through the bureaucracies of Washington, ushering in a new dawn of market-based solutions to every sort of problem. The book carried an endorsement from none other than Bill Clinton himself, and sure enough, the Democratic administration quickly embarked on its own "reinventing government" program, with Vice President Al Gore even writing a book of public-sector management theory that he simply called Businesslike Government: Lessons Learned from America's Best Companies.
Thomas, writing in the WSJ said:
The days when conservatives railed against red tape and shrieked for efficiency in Washington now seem like a lifetime ago. When they finally got the opportunity to put their theory into practice, conservatives contrived instead one of the most wasteful systems ever seen.
It is time for a new Grace Commission, this one examining the sordid history of privatization in all its details. President Barack Obama should launch it on day one.
In my previous diary "Conservatism killed the WV Miners", I shared a list of recent events including Toyota, Katrina, the financial collapse, which illustrated the failure of conservative dogma. We know that the Montcoal mining operation wasn't unionized and that the owners allowed citations to pile up by the scores without taking steps to ensure the now-dead miners had safe working conditions.
If this isn't an indictment of the Conservatism of Newt Gingrich, of Grover Norquist, of John McCain, of Sarah Palin, of George Bush, of Jack Abramoff, of Ronald Reagan, of Dick Cheney, then what is?
The conservative idea of free markets has failed. It did not emancipate blacks and women. It did not result in safe food or medicines or water or air or working conditions. De-regulation has only helped to increase the gap between rich and poor. And it has killed more than 20 miners in WV.
The challenge is for Progressives to convince the American public that Conservatism has failed, that Government is good.
Be sure to check out Thomas Frank talking with Bill Moyers
Part 1
Part 2
Follow along with the transcript here.