1. Restoration of the rule of law
2. A strengthening of the Bill of Rights
3. A massive reduction of the regulatory state at all levels of government.
In a piece today, writing in National Review Online, Jonah Goldberg (who has been hitting it out of the park of late) provides a good example as to why #3 is so important.
Hillary Clinton is no populist. Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online.
In a society so polarized along ideological lines, it’s no surprise that partisans will have partisan explanations for why this is so. But the underlying conditions driving the discontent are in fact bipartisan. Anyone who listened closely to both the tea parties and the Occupy Wall Street crowd could hear the echoes of similar complaints.
The incestuous relationship between big business and big government drives both the Left and the Right crazy. As a conservative, I think the right-wingers have better remedies for the problem. In a nutshell, big corporations will always have the resources — financial, political, legal, etc. — to manipulate and navigate around regulations.
The problem is that, for the last 20 years or so, both the GOP and the Democratic party have operated with the thought that things would be better if only they were in charge and crafting the solution. The thinking that surrounds this is what I call "There ought to be a law" solutions to every problem, real or perceived.Smaller firms simply can’t handle the compliance costs of draconian regulations. The result: Only the really big companies can survive and thrive, which in turn makes them “too big to fail.” That’s why community banks are being destroyed by Obama’s policies: They can’t carry the costs the way the big banks can, and, lacking connections and influence, they’re small enough to fail.
The problem with thinking of this type is that there is always going to be something out there that demagogues can use to try and expand the regulatory state. There's always a crisis in today's fast-paced news cycle and our elected officials and hyper-reactionary media are always ready to make it into something that can be 'fixed' if only we pour more government resources or people into fixing it.
Then you have the advocacy groups, who are always ready to head to the fainting couch whenever anyone, anywhere, suffers even the smallest injury at work, or due to something just going wrong. We've forgotten in America that accidents, sometimes even tragic ones, happen and not always due to some level of malfeasance or negligence on the part of those responsible.
Not every bad financial decision is caused by greed. Sometimes, most times, they are the result of management incompetence, not some nefarious attempt to defraud "Americans". Are their cases of greed in the business world? Criminal greed? Of course. But by prosecuting every bad bet as a criminal act we lose our sense of outrage when the real bad players come along.
And this all ignores that many of the worst actors are on the government payroll. The Federal employees busted for watching 2-6 hours of porn per day for example, are in many cases still at their jobs and their is currently no mechanism which allows them to be fired. Contrast this with the Office of Natural Resources Revenue who is currently working to currently writing final rules that would punish companies with punitive fines in the Millions for "knowing and willful" errors as small as one dollar. (In fact, the ONRR is proposing they untie penalties from the amount allegedly owed, suggesting that even inadvertent volumetric errors (with no financial consequence) result in the same penalties as those with financial impact).
Who this is going to hurt the most are not so-called "big-oil" (of whom, full disclosure, I am an employee) but the small, independent oil and gas producers who will not be able to compete for leases on federal lands. Amazingly, what the Texas GLO is proposing is even more punitive than the federal government (and this is in ostensibly "business friendly" Texas). All of this is in an effort to "secure every dollar" for the taxpayer. It's "for the children" of course.
How these agencies justify it being "for the children" when their policies make it less likely that businesses will grow, hire more, and lift more families out of poverty is a question, but in most cases they just don't care.
Sadly, there are a significant amount of their constituency who don't care either. (the first comment from Niko Bellic on a story about his fellow citizens losing their jobs)
Looks like O&G yuppies are going to have to cut back on $500 bottle service at the club every weekend and maybe do it once a month. Some might even have to really cut back and not call themselves "foodies" which sadly means no more $50 lunches. Poor babies.
Granted, Houston is a stupid, ugly selfish city increasingly full of the same type of people, but there's nothing you can do to counter that attitude and it's an attitude that's spreading among progressives. And that's why whatever follows the GOP doesn't need to try. You can't win over progressives, but you can remind people who have found harbor with the Democrats traditionally what progressives really think about them and how their policies are designed not to help, but to keep them on the hook.
It's either that or get hooked yourself. There really is no middle ground.
