From Will Wilkinson by way of Andrew Sullivan:
“The great success of the GOP over the last eight years has been to destroy the reputation of free markets and limited government by deploying its rhetoric and then doing the opposite.”
Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
From Will Wilkinson by way of Andrew Sullivan:
“The great success of the GOP over the last eight years has been to destroy the reputation of free markets and limited government by deploying its rhetoric and then doing the opposite.”
You can’t blame the Bush administration for everything… After all, it was the Clinton administration that pressured Fannie Mae into lowering the standards and accept subprime lending in the late 90’s.
It’s not clear that Wilkinson is blaming the Bush administration for everything. What he does say is that the Bush administration failed to live up to the free market ideals it theoretically espoused. And that criticism strikes me as fair.
Bush’s heart was in “compassionate conservatism”, which was basically Big Government informed by “conservative values”. Bush was _not_ a free marketeer or anything remotely resembling a libertarian.
The sad thing is that since Republicans are traditionally the party where free marketeers and libertarians* tend to reside, Obama and the Left uses Bush as a bogeyman for arguing against the free market.
Now, we’ll get Big Government informed by good ol’ fashioned leftie values of class and race warfare and “organized labor” (ie, the bureaucrat unions). And there’s little Republicans can do about it without formally walking away from the Bush years.
*Yes, I know there’s something called the Libertarian Party out there, but libertarians who want to actually do something useful are in the Republican Party for the most part.