At The Weekly Standard, Jay Cost claims,
As I argued here, and in my new book, the Republican party has been aligned with big business for almost 150 years. In many respects, this is a good thing for conservatism. People who are employed by a business, after all, do not need the government to prosper. And big business employs a lot of people, so conservatives have common cause.
It’s a lovely delusion – but only that. Without the government, you do not have national defense. You might be able to have private police – but, speaking as an engineer, that system is naturally unstable. You might have private fire fighting service, but that appears to be uncommon (I have not tracked that phenomenon since my days reading REASON Magazine). You don’t have a national currency – arguing that Bitcoin makes government unnecessary merely highlights the fact that the technologies supporting Bitcoin – namely computers – were developed only with critical government support.
Small points? Maybe he’s a bit sloppy? Perhaps; yet all of the inaccuracies, the hidden biases, they all add up, until the entire paragraph, superficially comprehensible, becomes incoherent when read in depth. Searching for some even minor truth, and I become overerwhelmed at how a collection of fallacies masquerade as some self-evident truth. And at how his readership will swallow it without blinking.
In any case, President Calvin Coolidge said it sooner:
