To even consider taking Sarah Palin seriously on, well anything, is laughable. When she was first picked to be John McCain’s running mate my guess was that she was inexperienced but an up and coming conservative who was at least well versed in conservative ideas and had some basic competence in government. It turned out I was wrong and that she is clearly a politician of the George Bush model who knows how to schmooze people to get ahead but is remarkably ignorant when it comes to policy matters. In a recent speech, which I didn’t bother with commenting on at the time because of more important matters to attend to that day (which included happy hour with $2 glasses of Sangria and crab cake sliders) Palin said, “Some in Washington would approach our economic woes in ways that absolutely defy Economics 101, and they fly in the face of principles, providing opportunity for industrious Americans to succeed or to fail on their own accord.” Palin hardly seems to have any understanding of Economics 101, or any other, topic.
Conor Clarke, blaming his RSS reader as opposed to Sangria during happy hour, also didn’t get around to commenting on Palin’s speech until recently. He saw the absurdity in taking Palin seriously as a fiscal conservative, writing “In particular, that line about “industrious Americans” succeeding and failing of their own accord made we want to take a look at the federal dollars Alaska receives per resident relative to its federal tax burden.”
Conor made a chart of the data which is worth glancing at and concluded:
Alaska gets $13,950 per resident from the federal government, more than any other state in the nation. It ranks number one in taxes per resident and number one in spending per resident. It’s also number one in pork-barrel spending. Each Alaska resident receives a check for $3,200 a year from state oil revenues — which Palin bumped up from $2,000 last year. Palin once justified this by saying that the state of Alaska was “set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” (Sounds socialist!) Industrious indeed.
Paliin sure sounds more like a socialist than those she attacks as socialists, as I noted last October. Rather than having a state where people “succeed or fail on their own” Palin brought in more earmarks per capita than any other state (with John McCain having opposed many of these earmarks).
Clarke only hit on one of the absurdities of Palin’s speech but there were more. She warned of big government that will “control the people,” failing to understand both that the current economic crisis is a partially the result of insufficient government regulation of the banking industry and that pragmatic government action rather than blind adherence to ideology is needed to reverse the slide. While Economics 101 is well beyond Sarah Palin, she might check out a book by an economic conservative (assuming she wouldn’t agree to touch a book by a liberal) who has realized the danger in treating conservative dogma as a religion. While it is probably well beyond her, she should read A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 And The Descent Into Depression by Richard Posner.
In worrying about whether government will “control the people” Palin makes a mistake common among many conservatives and libertarians of confusing the need to limit the power of government with limiting the size of government and taking a knee-jerk opposition to any government economic action. What is important is how much control government has over the lives of individuals. While conservatives dwell on the size of government, liberals are more concerned with limiting the power of government in areas where they do not belong. While the faux libertarian rhetoric of Sarah Palin concentrates on her Voodoo Economic beliefs, she backs increased an increased influence of government in private matters, ranging from her opposition to abortion rights to her support for banning books which offended her supporters who oppose toleration of homosexuals. While liberals have been concerned with restoring the limitations on the power of the executive branch as advocated by the Founding Fathers, Palin has been a supporter of increased government secrecy and wanted to grab even more power than Dick Cheney.
For someone who expresses such concern over whether the government will “control the people,” Palin also displays a rather Orwellian view of First Amendment rights. She believes that the First Amendment was intended to prevent the media from criticizing her, not to protect freedom of the press.
For someone who claims to oppose big government, she supports the two major threats to freedom in America today, the social agenda of the religious right and the “war on terror.” The “war on terror,” along with its associated restrictions on civil liberties, capitalizes on the threat of terrorism to promote a massive increase in the power of the state. Rather than supporting legitimate defense against terrorism (which conservatives have a poor record on), Palin repeated the conservative lines that the Iraq war was about fighting terrorism and their ridiculous mantra that we must fight them there or we will have to fight them at home. In her speech she even said, “It is war over there, so it will not be war over here.” Sarah Palin’s understanding of foreign policy is no better than her understanding of economics–and don’t even get me started on her ridiculous views on scientific research and creationism.