Too bad I hadn't read Sheldon Richman before I entered the studio. Richman
watched Jonathan Alter of Newsweek interviewed on MSNBC about his latest column in which he writes a near-obituary for the McCain campaign. He attributes the state of the campaign to McCain's failure to "break not just from Bush, but from the rotting corpse of his party." Instead, Alter says, he's fighting the last war, which won't work because, among other reasons, "the free-market party of Reagan is dead (thanks to the financial crisis).
"Free-market party? A free-market party would have abolished Fannie and Freddie. It would have renounced the "too big to fail" doctrine. It would have ended all business privileges, along with the regulations (which the GOP left untouched). It would have at least begun to cut spending and borrowing. It would have stopped the deep economic distortion wrought by the military-industrial complex and its war-based imperial foreign policy. Has there been even a tiny movement in these directions?
This is why radical free-market advocates must hope that a Republican never is elected president. The party is an albatross for any champion of individual liberty because no matter what it does to increase the size of the state, its occasional mild lip-service to freedom is all that counts for most people. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton did some deregulating, but they are never called laissez-faire advocates.
The bigger the loss for McCain-Palin, the better.
On Imperialism
The problem is, a landslide victory for Obama might be interpreted as a "mandate" for something far worse than the GOP's socialist version of "the free market."
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