Starve the beast... with steak!*

Very interesting post by Ed Kilgore at Newdonkey.com today, about how the corruption that runs through the Republican-controlled government like fat marbled through a ribeye is inherent in conservatism itself, and not merely the corrupting influence of absolute power. Their power makes this corruption possible, of course -- but it's their philosophy which made it inevitable.

Here are the money paragraphs at the end, but read the whole thing:

The ready embrace of "starve the beast" ideology by the Republican Party of the W. era has also exposed another rotten underpinning of conservatism in power: if you don't believe in the actual ability of the federal government to do anything of real value, then why not turn federal agencies into patronage machines and well-paid holding pens for rising young ideologues?

This question, I suspect, explains how you get from Reaganesque critiques of bureaucratic incompetence to Brownie, in less than a generation.

In other words, I believe the endemic corruption of conservatives in power we are witnessing today is not just a morality play about power's corrupting influence, or about the descent of ideologues into the practical swamps of politics. Worse than that, it's about the consequences of entrusting government's vast power to people who can't think of it as a force for the common good, and thus, inevitably, treat it as a force for private gain.

Rob

*analogy only. No actual cattle were consumed.