Conservatives like myself are all hoping that the newly-elected senators and congressmen will be successful in getting the country moving again. The first step is a realistic look at where the country stands politically so that the program can be approached in a realistic manner. The people can’t be suddenly moved in a direction they are not prepared to go in even when it is the right direction.
Looking at the political landscape, the electorate is divided in three groups.
The first group is the people who believe in free market capitalism. This group will never vanish because free market capitalism is the system that works the best.
The second group is made up of the people who believe in big government to solve all of their problems. This group can never vanish because the attraction of living at the expense of others is so great.
The third group is made up of people who have never learned enough to make up their minds on much of anything. This group will never vanish because lack of knowledge is so easy to come by.
This third group, however, has one great and redeeming virtue: They can tell when things are not going the way they should, blame the party in power and kick them out.
This is good for everyone. The weakness of this group is that they have trouble recognizing either good or bad ideas before they are tried. They just know when something doesn’t work.
The one really bad thing about this group is that they will from time to time try Marxism as a solution to their problems so we all suffer while we find out for the umpteenth time that Marxist ideas “still don’t work.”
These people seem to think that if you give Marxism a different name that it will work differently.
The conservatives in power are in the delicate position that they must change the direction of the country, but it has to be done gently. They have to work around the margin rather than going for the big gains. Most of the good things that need to be done must be accomplished gradually.
Some of the vital things that should be done include tax reduction, regulation reduction, currency stabilization, tort reform and elimination of barriers to trade. These can all be addressed gradually so that the people can get used to the ideas.
Note that all of the above reforms, except tort reform, require that the government do less of what it is doing now.
The one thing the Republicans must constantly keep reminding themselves is that they didn’t win the election; the Democrats lost it.
Furthermore, many of the people who voted the Democrats out of power have no earthly idea why the Democratic programs are not working. Many of the voters have no idea of what Marxism is or the reasons why it can’t work. If the Republicans don’t get things moving again the electorate will, no doubt, choose to try yet another failing round of Marxism.
One thing the free market capitalists need to do is to try to shrink the size of the other two groups. This is done through education and implementing successful free market measures.
The last time the conservatives won a big victory they assumed that the electorate was starting to see the world their way. Nothing could have been further from the truth as noted by the electoral victory of Marxism over Capitalism during the last presidential election.
Of course, McCain was a horrible example of a Free Market Capitalist as he had as many or more Marxist tendencies as Capitalistic tendencies. Furthermore, so many Republicans decided to act like big spending liberal Democrats that many people couldn’t see any difference in the parties. In fact, many were starting to call the Republicans “Marxist light.”
Of all the things conservatives must do, reducing taxation may be the easiest. The next easiest may be declaring a moratorium on new regulations and then getting rid of or reducing the regulation introduced in the last two years. Things like reforming Social Security may still be too difficult to do yet even though more and more people are recognizing it as the “Ponzi Game” that it is.
Here again change will probably have to be made slowly.
One of the great American paradoxes is that even though the great majority of regulations hurt the whole country each one gives some small but powerful group an unfair advantage over everyone else. Therefore, every regulation has powerful support even though it has no merit for the whole country. A conservative dream would be to sunset every federal regulation and allow reinstatement only after a full, public and congressional review.
Virtually every program that is hurting the country has a powerful constituency that will fight to the finish to prevent you from changing the program even though the changes would help everyone including those fighting the hardest to prevent change.
The bottom line for the Republicans is that they must stay loyal to free market principles and the principles of the founding fathers. Otherwise they will be blown out of Washington and the Marxists will have still another chance to make things worse.