So Long, GOP!
The libertarian columnist Steven Greenhut of the Orange County Register (about the only major West Coast newspaper to attack FDR for interning American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II [as Reason's Brian Doherty points out in Radicals for Capitalism]) is saying sayonara to the Republican Party based on the GOP's demonstrated disinterest in pushing something like free minds and free markets.
Under Republican leadership, the federal government has expanded—without even including war-related spending—far more quickly than it expanded under Bill Clinton. And when it comes to security matters, Republicans have been zealous in giving the feds additional powers to trample our privacy and liberties. Republicans have been unwavering in their support for embarking on nation-building experiments of the sort that traditional conservatives would abhor. The presidential candidates most committed to a muscular central government—Rudy Giuliani and John McCain—are leading the pack.
Which isn't to say he's lining up with the Dems, either:
the Republicans will focus more on terrorism and security issues, and the Democrats will focus more on health care and domestic regulation, but in this Brave New Paradigm, no major party will echo the words of that outdated crank, Thomas Jefferson, who argued that "the sum of good government" is one "which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned."
Perhaps that world already is here. Which is why I'm divorcing myself from the Republican Party, and keeping my distance from any group that doesn't place the defense of liberty as the prime goal of the political system.
