Conservative Government

Back when Democrats controlled the White House and liberalism seemed to have won the battle of history, a lot of us thought that conservatives were running against the 20th Century. As Paul Krugman points out today, in one of those columns that remind me why he, not I, teaches at Princeton and writes a column for The New York Times , W & Co. have been running a government that is like something out of the middle ages.

To summarize Krugman's points (don't rely on my precis--go and read the piece):

*The IRS has announced that it's going to outsource some tax collection to private debt collectors, a practice reminiscent of Bourbon France, where taxes were collected by "tax farmers," who got rich by extracting money from the common people and taking a cut. (Privatizing will cost a lot more than having the Revenue Service collect--something that it can be very good at, if properly funded.)

*Medieval kings used mercenaries rather than professional or citizen soldiers, a practice that was almost as hard on their own nations as on the ones that they invaded. The Bush administration has outsourced torture, mayhem and a great deal of what should be public security functions to contractors like Blackwater USA; those contractors even act as bodyguards to senior American civilian and military officials in Iraq--something that should be one of the most basic functions of government. Krugman quotes one officer as saying of these American mercenaries, "They shoot people, and someone else has to deal with the aftermath.”

*Monarchs, lacking a civil service, appointed viceroys to govern fiefs granted to them. We have such instrumentalities as the Coalition Provisional Authority, which more or less acted as the governing body of occupied Iraq. Last week, a judge ruled that the authority, which was created without congressional action, was not an instrumentality of the United States government. This is reminiscent of the Congo which, for the first decades of its rule by Belgium, was the personal property of the Belgian king.

Krugman concludes by suggesting that the foregoing demonstrate that people who run against government can't do a good job of governing--a point Democrats should take every opportunity to make.

I guess my bumper sticker, which says "One King George Was Enough / Impeach Bush," was truer than I thought.