The basic anti-government Republican strategy for the last 20 years or so has been to “starve the beast” meaning, to so deprive the government of income via tax cuts, unfunded programs, and wars, that eventually cutting government would not be an option but a “necessity”.
So here we are today with the Republicans, who created our huge national mess, becoming the deficit hawks, hawking the “chicken little” mantra that the government is crashing, run for your lives! All this with the weeping walrus tears for the hardships that this “tragic necessity” might entail for some of our more vulnerable citizens who, we cannot help without seriously endangering our entire economy.
This is exactly what the British government told the Irish peasants during the great famine of 1844-47, and for the same dogmatic ideological (religious) reason based upon the, then fairly new, totem pole religion of laissez-faire capitalism. That this fundamentalist economic dogmatism survives to this day is only understandable in terms of an enlightened and well financed self interest of the few, versus the ignorance of the many.
We have a very weird culture in the US where economics and politics are preached and practiced as religions. The “invisible hand” of Adam Smith is actually “seen” as the hand of God moving throughout history to accomplish his or her hidden purposes. “Ours is not to question but only believe”. It is, of course, a false god and a false religion which means that millions of us, who purport to believe in Judaism or Christianity, have another god that we believe in and worship, and often with more zeal than our Saturday and Sunday pew religions. We are are therefore guilty, not only of error but of Idolatry.
The most popular religions today offer a seamless blending of them all. It works beautifully. But the religion of equating and blending true and false gods, religion with politics, economics with worship, becomes total falsehood, and dangerously false. Error has consequences. The intentional, “Starving the beast of government” is just one example of many.
