No sooner was the body of 2011 state elections getting buried than Democrat New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu began his 2015 campaign for governor, launching the first iteration of a strategy he hopes will break the Republican stranglehold they now enjoy on the statewide executive offices.
If any lesson in electoral politics has become clear over the past two election cycles in Louisiana, it is that, unless your constituency is in a poor urban area or a backwater, you cannot run and win office as a liberal Democrat for a state office, especially of the statewide executive kind. Landrieu realizes this and so has commenced testing a theme that tries to promote him as a centrist through a kind of misdirection, by offering extreme interpretations of what both major political parties stand for and then positing that he rejects both in favor of consensus and the practical. He launched this in a speech at a New Orleans meeting aptly enough sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
By doing so, he practices two different kinds of deception.
One involves the use of straw men, particularly asserting beliefs to Republicans that simply don’t exist. For example, he implied that Republicans, in order to support ideas of smaller and limited government, adhered to the credo that “government doesn’t create jobs,” and then gave obvious examples of government functions and contracting that had employment opportunities attached to them.
But conservatives in the Republican Party never have argued this. Rather, their feelings more accurately would be expressed with a slight alteration to “government doesn’t create jobs efficiently.” Supporters of limited government note quite correctly that whenever government tries to provide a service that can be done by the private sector, the inherent inefficiency of government, due to following political goals instead of incorporating individual goals expressed through voluntary choices made in a market, makes for more expensive provision of the same good. Thus, they argue that government should do things only where there is an absolute need that the private sector cannot adequately fill based upon equity in provision, such as (at the municipal level) provision of public safety, roads, safety measures, etc.
Therefore, they argue that, wherever possible, government should not engage in anything but these activities because otherwise it drives out private sector suppliers, as its power of unlimited compulsory taxation can fund these activities regardless of how efficiently they get run, and forces more resources to be taken from the people involuntarily to pay for them than the citizenry would pay voluntarily to get services if left to private sector provision. And, they also believe even where policy dictates government provision that it maximally be accomplished through contracting out to the private sector, for the same reason of efficient provision.
If Landrieu believes in any of this, he does so tepidly at best. If he did, that certainly contradicts the record he built as lieutenant governor, where in times of fiscal austerity he continually argued for low-priority items. Nor does his current tenure give confidence that he does not firmly believe that government ought to be the provider of many things, such as by his insistence in public building and support of a New Orleans East hospital, instead of settling for private providers with urgent care facilities, in a service area with too many hospital beds already and more coming and where comparable statistics show it cannot operate at a profit.
What Landrieu truly seems to be is a disciple of the “reinventing government” crowd that does not focus on right-sizing government, but making it work better; thus his rejection, for example, of the statement “there is not too much regulation.” Here, he maintained that the structure of regulatory authority could be altered to increase efficiency – without any admission that the scope and volume of regulatory activities was too great. While a laudatory goal, advocates of this view try to make this a substitute for the need of making the size of government appropriate to what it legitimately should be doing, avoiding any discussion about what needs paring. This constitutes his second deception, at least in the sense that he can present himself as anything but an advocate of big government.
3 comments:
Very cogent and important comments on a subject that needs to be visited and uncovered often.
Thanks.
The dishonesty Jeff spews here is breathtaking. In Jeff's right-wing bubble, conservatives have "never" argued that "government doesn't create jobs." But that is the exact garbage that conservatives spewed throughout the stimulus debate, and continue to spit on a daily basis. It's so easy to disprove idiots like Jeff, just type "government doesn't create jobs" into a search engine, and immediately every right-wing "news" organization is making the same boldly stupid claim Jeff says they aren't making. The mantra "govt doesn't create jobs as efficiently as the private sector" is that of the liberal, who prefers to let the market create wealth, while injecting stimulus spending only when (and in the manner that) economists conclude has the best prospects of helping the economy (and regulation only when the public's overriding interest is at stake). This is exactly how it should be. The dilemma of whether to spend, how to spend, when to spend, and how much is a difficult question mulled by our nation's top economic minds, and that is a debate that takes place entirely on the liberal side of the spectrum. The conservative "debate" is to wait until liberals do something, then shriek that that thing is the worst thing ever and will cause the collapse of western civilization. That is, there is no contemplation on the conservative side, it is merely an anti-liberal reflexive reaction. Now lets further examine the depth of Jeff's dishonesty. Do you remember when conservatives took power in 2000 and immediately began on the most reckless spending spree in history? Conservatives like Jeff have short memories, but rest assured that this spending was not tailored NOT to boost the economy, but rather to reward political benefactors. After tanking the economy, conservatives promised that they've changed their ways and are suddenly all different. [The obvious local example is the politician Jeff worships, Jindal, who threw a quarter of a *B*illion dollars (!!!!!) of taxpayer money at political benefactors to build sand dunes which the entire scientific community correctly predicted would fail miserablly. That's "investment," conservative style]. Meanwhile, the Obama stimulus spending was supported by the bulk of economists, and was tailored exactly to boost the economy (not reward cronies). Meanwhile, conservatives hysterically opposed the stimulus, claiming alternatively that it wouldn't create a single job(!) and would even take away jobs(!!). [full disclosure: i was against the stimulus and auto bailout, but unlike the conservatives, i can admit that they worked.]. When conservatives shriek that "government IS the problem," they never qualify it like Jeff says they do because conservatives reject grey nuance.
Here are just a few articles that betray Jeff's lie: "How Government Spending Kills Jobs" http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=44363
And one of the most powerful conservatives shrieking that "Stimulus Bill Kills Jobs": http://www.atr.org/stimulus-bill-kills-jobs-a3104
Give up, Jeff. Your right-wing garbage only works in a vacuum of similar-minded hysterics; you can't open yourself up to the public like this and expect not to be called out on it.
The vast ignorance displayed by this comment is astounding, exceeded only by its the creation of straw men. Just to hit some highlights -- to assert that "The dilemma of whether to spend, how to spend, when to spend, and how much is a difficult question mulled by our nation's top economic minds, and that is a debate that takes place entirely on the liberal side of the spectrum" entirely flees from reality, both in that conservatives engage in this exercise much more carefully than liberals precisely because they understand the enormous destructive power that government has through its spending decisions on the public and its liberty, and that top economic minds, by definition, cannot be liberal so long as they cling to discredited economic ideologies such as by Keynes and his acolytes. Begin with von Mises and Hayek, and work towards Bovard, Rothbard, etc. to understand this.
Also, this space never has advocated excessive government spending under any president, regardless of party of the White House's occupant. Of course, this error fits the indoctrinated quality of the commenter's argument, who continued to show his ignorance about his refuted claims about the policy and spending consequences of the berm issue, as well as his bullheaded refusal to understand the real consequences of the Obama spending bills.
And I could go on but won't, allowing my frequent contributor here to work out his insecurities when challenged in ways he realizes he does not have the evidence to refute. But, 2+2 always does not equal 4 when, as this commenter consistently shows, you ignore fact and logic in favor of prejudice to support otherwise unsustainable views.
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