Bradley in DC
04-08-2009, 09:49 PM
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123914757330399021.html#mod=djemEditorialPage
Mr. Sanford is transfixed, for example, by the perfidy of big government. Deficit spending, the issue of the day, has always struck him as fantastically evil, and in his congressional period he even quoted an early 19th century Scottish theorist on why government spending can force a democracy to collapse. Social Security is another bad idea, he argues in his book, and it needs to be replaced by personal retirement accounts . . .
Besides, a "citizen legislator" in a hair shirt is an American stock figure every bit as phony and pretentious as a self-important senator being ferried about in an Air Force jet. Think of William Henry Harrison, propelled to the White House in 1840 in a gust of log-cabin-and-hard-cider folksiness. Or of down-home Huey Long. Or of the amazing succession of fake cowboys and pseudo-populists who have presided over Washington in the past 30-odd years. And now compare those politicians' aw-shucks ways with the massive concentration of wealth they engineered.
Mr. Sanford's democratic idealism may be for real, but it is also -- in its ignorance of what actually goes on in the world -- what made America into the least virtuous, least equal country it has been in many years.
Mr. Sanford is transfixed, for example, by the perfidy of big government. Deficit spending, the issue of the day, has always struck him as fantastically evil, and in his congressional period he even quoted an early 19th century Scottish theorist on why government spending can force a democracy to collapse. Social Security is another bad idea, he argues in his book, and it needs to be replaced by personal retirement accounts . . .
Besides, a "citizen legislator" in a hair shirt is an American stock figure every bit as phony and pretentious as a self-important senator being ferried about in an Air Force jet. Think of William Henry Harrison, propelled to the White House in 1840 in a gust of log-cabin-and-hard-cider folksiness. Or of down-home Huey Long. Or of the amazing succession of fake cowboys and pseudo-populists who have presided over Washington in the past 30-odd years. And now compare those politicians' aw-shucks ways with the massive concentration of wealth they engineered.
Mr. Sanford's democratic idealism may be for real, but it is also -- in its ignorance of what actually goes on in the world -- what made America into the least virtuous, least equal country it has been in many years.