Mail Call
Eric Mauro writes
I liked that Cogent [Provocateur] post. I think his last couple paragraphs about fooling people are going to hit home with more voters than Bush etc expect. One piece of the “why” puzzle he misses is that the WMD story was nurtured through both Republican and Democratic administrations. Khidir Hamza was turned from a joker to Saddam’s Bombmaker by Bill Clinton. There was no political opposition worth speaking of because both parties were completely corrupted, using the story to their own advantage.
Meanwhile, reader Grant Gould says he’s run the numbers on gridlock and good government:
After someone made particularly perposterous claims about there being a “party of small government” (and, alarmingly, about the Republicans being that party) I put Senate, House, and presidency party makeups since 1929[1] into a spreadsheet, along with government spending as a fraction of GDP, and ran a correlation.
The House makeup had no correlation whatsoever with government size. Democrats in the Senate correlated strongly with government size. Republican presidents correlated strongly with big government. I am beginning to suspect that, from a purely functional point of view, the lesser-evil party is a carefully split ticket.
If this correlation is real then your analysis is correct and libertarians do have practical voting choices that could make a real difference. Which I, personally, would find delightful.
Republican governors seem to have a positive effect in this regard at the state level, but I haven’t yet gotten that spreadsheet complete enough to say that definitively.
For more discussion - and denial, and deflection, of CP’s “Operation Desert Snipe” essay and That Issue, see this Samizdata post by Jonathan Pearse and the associated comment thread.
