Some people argue that because Republicans have failed to reduce the size of government in the last 30 years, we haven’t succeeded and therefore somehow the party isn’t really for it. That’s like arguing that the abolitionists were kidding until 1863. These things take more time than you’d like.
Reason: What would success look like?
Norquist: There are no permanent victories in politics, but success would be spending declining, as a percentage of GDP, indefinitely into the future. Three big fixes that we need are school choice, privatizing Social Security and state and local pensions, and a single-rate flat tax that taxes income one time. Then the cost of government is clear to everybody, you’ve made everybody an owner in the stock market, and you’ve broken up the largest monopoly in the country, the education monopoly. The rest is just clean-up.
None of these things is going to happen in the next two years. But we are getting cracks in the public school monopoly in Arizona and Pennsylvania. We’re getting close to having the power to have complete school choice in Texas, South Carolina, Florida. You have one state with that example and it just breaks the government monopoly. Once you’ve got it in a large state, you can’t keep pretending that all these bad things would happen—that they’d sell your kids to the Arabs or harvest organs or whatever.
On defined contribution pensions, Gov. Jon Corzine has just called for it in New Jersey—the bluest of the blue states. Ten states have moved toward defined benefit plans, including Florida. When you’ve done that and people are sufficiently aware of it, the arguments against privatizing Social Security also melt.
And each of the Bush tax reforms—trying to get rid of the death tax, cutting the capital gains tax, cutting the double taxation of dividend income, paring back the alternative minimum tax—helps you get to a single-rate tax that taxes income one time only.
Reason: What about civil liberties? When will Republicans rejoin the Leave Us Alone Coalition?
Norquist: I think the first and greatest civil liberty is being able to own guns. Everything else is negotiable with the government. If they get your guns then your leverage is kind of limited.
Secondly, are you allowed to control your resources, your home, your income, your investments? If you don’t control those, you’re just pretending to have rights that you can’t afford to do anything about. If the government cuts your taxes enough that you can own a big house, you just pull the curtains and you’re fine.
The Democrats aren’t really willing to cut you any slack on those things anyway. Everything that was in the PATRIOT Act that was a problem was asked for by Clinton, and Republicans stopped it. Then they got shaken up by September 11 and gave the president powers that I think were unwise.
But Republicans have shown that they are willing to fight the president on whether or not to torture terror suspects. And it was Republicans who raised some of the questions about extending the PATRIOT Act, and it was the Republicans who fought most competently against the imposition of the first PATRIOT Act unamended. In the House they were willing to prune it back. It was when the Democrats in the Senate collapsed that there was no pruning back.
Markos Moulitsas
Markos Moulitsas founded Daily Kos (dailykos.com) in 2003. Since then, the Berkeley-based tech entrepreneur’s site has grown to dominate the political blogosphere, promote dozens of Democratic candidates, and provoke controversy with its embrace of pro-gun, pro-privacy, but not entirely pro-market “libertarian Democrats.” He is the author, with Jerome Armstrong, of Crashing the Gate (Chelsea Green, 2006).
Reason: Why should libertarians vote for Democrats?
Markos Moulitsas: Aside from the Second Amendment, the GOP seems to have fallen in love with both corporate and government intrusion into the private lives of Americans. Notions of privacy have been tossed aside in the name of “security” and “moral values.” They peer into our bedrooms, listen in on our phone calls, toss aside constitutional protections whenever they see fit, and have even abandoned the principle of separation of powers, with key administration legal scholars arguing that Bush has dictatorial-like powers during “wartime.”
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