An Ominous Trend

When Italy nationalized banks in 1933, “the architects who designed the system envisaged it as temporary,” she says. “It was in place until the end of the 1990s.” More recently, the Japanese government injected capital into banks to get them to lend to big corporations, keeping alive “the zombie companies that economists talk about,” she says.

Even as Hank Paulson, Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and President Bush assure the public that the trend toward government control of business is 'temporary,' the lesson from history shows the opposite.

An article at Bloomberg entitled, 'Saving Capitalism is No Sure Thing as Statism Undermines the Economy,' presents a sobering, clear-headed perspective on the current trend against free markets in favor of socialistic concepts that form the core of centralized government control.

The problem is that history proves that such government interventionism does nothing to prevent economic distress but prolongs it.

The other lesson from history is that once governments gain such control over free enterprise they are very reluctant to relinquish that control.

Statism vs. Liberty

The notion of a big government nanny state takes on many forms. Big government Republicans can be just as dangerous as liberal Democrats. Both support big government and are therefore the purveyors of statism.

Despite their protests to the contrary, statists by their very nature oppose human liberty.

We have seen the work of so-called 'compassionate conservatives' in vastly expanding the size and scope of government. Liberty has suffered as a result.

To be sure, 'compassionate conservatives' compensate for their statism by supporting tax cuts. Big government liberals have never supported the idea that citizens get to keep more of their own money.

As Geraldine Ferraro told Bill O'Reilly recently when O'Reilly complained about Obama's possible hefty tax increases on his money, 'Just be glad you get to keep some of it.'

This is the liberal ideology in a nutshell. They think your money belongs to them and you get to keep some of it only by their good graces.

Ferraro is totally and absolutely wrong. She should just be glad we allow the government to take some of it.

After all, that money is ours, not the government's. We pay taxes only as the citizens allow government to collect it.

At least the big government conservatives agree with my view on taxes.

But I am greatly disturbed by recent trends among conservatives, especially within the GOP, to embrace and support the expansion of government. This is totally antithetical to the views of our Founders.

As someone stated recently as I was reading through blogs, perhaps the terms 'conservative' and 'Republican' have lost their significance. Perhaps better terms are 'statism' as propounded by big government statists, and 'liberty' as propounded by small government Jeffersonians.

An encouraging sign that the true conservatives, the small government Jeffersonians, have gotten the message is that a group within government made up of the guardians of liberty has been engaging in a series of meetings since the election.

This group maintains that they put no stock in the fact that a person may refer to themselves as 'Republican' or 'conservative.' The only thing that matters to them is whether or not the person is anti-statism and a guardian of liberty as envisioned by the small-government Framers of the Constitution.

And this is the best sign of hope I've seen in a long time.