If there is any economic assumption that undergirds today’s Republican Party it is that Adam Smith had it right when he described the “invisible hand” that make markets work most efficiently.
Light-weight Republican hacks like Grover Norquist have been championing a simple-minded and corrupted version of Smith’s philosophy. Unaware or indifferent to Smith’s very real belief that fairness and charity should be introduced into the invisible mechanics of the soulless marketplace Norquist has said that his goal is to make “government so small that you can strangle it in a bathtub.”
Tom Delay Grover Norquist and a whole passle of Republicans are guilty of their own more selfish violations of the invisible hand. Perhaps camophlaged hand is a better discription of things like the K Street Project where Republican lobbyists ply congressmen and their staffs for statutory law which will tilt the invisible hand in their favor or win them government contracts like the many shabby ones granted during the Second Iraq War.
Today’s example of the GOP’s visible hand has to do with President Bush’s billion dollar Reading readiness program which got directed to good ole boys friends of the Republican Party.
Not surprisingly when good-ole-boys get overpriced federal contracts they turn around and contribute a hunk of their “earnings” to the campaigns of the small government folks who got him their big payday. Its just plain old good business.
Or take the secretive, arch-conservative, New York multi-millionaires who have spent millions to organize petition drives in dozens of states to put caps on state taxation fueled not only with their money but with a heavy dose of deceit. Invisible hand indeed!
