PRESTOPUNDIT -- A Good Blog at a Great Price. Guaranteed.

George Will gives three cheers for an ever expanding federal government. Is it just me, or does George Will sound here about as well connected in reality as a high flying Michael Jackson? And aren't we all tired of this bait and switch "liberal" and "conservative" wordplay? As Lincoln liked to say, "How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." Calling Bush's massive expansion of federal power amd spending "conservative" no more makes it conservative than does calling a dogs tail a 'leg' make the thing a leg. Reagan Republicans continue to get their rear section handed to them by former Democrats in "neoconservative" bow ties. What's a libertarian? A Reagan Republican mugged by a gang of "neoconservatives" -- i.e. one-time Stevenson Democrats, Rockefeller Republicans, and Stom Thurmond Dixiecrats.

Finally, it's an "elephant in the livingroom" lie to interpret the inevitable outcome of a screw-your-neighbor political system as "public opinion" or "the will of the people". What people want and what the logic of the system produces are two very different things. And George Will (and Glenn Reynolds) don't have to be any smarter than the paperboy to know it. It's been obvious for a long time that Madison's Constitution has failed the test of the purposes found in Federalist #10. Can you say logrolling? Can you say, "what have you done for the district?" This has nothing to do with any "common good" which people want for the country. It has everything to do with picking your neighbors pocket because he's damn well already picking your own pocket. In the military we called this a "cluster f**k". Teenagers would call it a "circle j**k". It doesn't take fancy rational choice theory to understand. So, I'm sick of the lie that "American's are getting the government they want". Indeed, Americans are rationally ignorant of just how much government they are getting -- or how much government they might want. Al Sharpton thinks that the super rich are being taxed at a 5% tax rate -- and their taxes should be "raised" to, say 15%. For Sharpton's purposes, he's perfectly rational to be completely uninformed about the facts of the matter, for what difference it will possibly make to the successful pursuit of his own personal aims.

(Semi-technical aside. It's rather clear that for all the difference it could ever make in the causal nexus of the universe, a single individual is never acting rationally by voting, or even following political events. There is just no chance that a single vote from a single point of view can make any difference in the whole scheme of things. In a national election, it's never happened, and the experience of Florida should show you that it really can't ever happen. There are a dozen other factors which intervene before that single vote could be the deciding factor -- and this is just another thousand lottery rolls of probability on top of the effectively zero odds that a national election will come down to a single cast vote.)

So are Americans choosing the government they want? Are they even thinking clearly and well about the problem? Rational choice theory tells us that we shouldn't expect them to think any clearer or well than Peter Pan political commentator George Will. And if they do happen to think clearly about it, choice theory tells us plainly that the logic of the situation will still drive them to make expedient and collectively destructive choices they would never have made if choosing directly for the common good as a whole. Ask a Congressman and he'll tell you. He's voting for the good of his district, and he's not worrying about the good of the country. And if he doesn't tell you that, he's lying. Trust me.

As they say, it ain't rocket science folks.