McCain and Palin, plucky foes of spreading the wealth, must have known that such spreading is most what Washington does. Here, the Constitution is an afterthought; the utmost axiom of the win is the canon of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Sugar implication quotas expense the American citizenry approximately $2 billion a year, but that total is siphoned from 300 million consumers in small, arcane increments that are not noticed. The few thousand sugar producers on whom billions are thereby conferred do make note and are thankful to the authority that bilks the many for the enrichment of the few. Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, still most, oversight spreading of bounteousness is economically detrimental and morally dubious -- pernicious because, by directing excellent to suboptimum uses, it slows cash creation; morally dubious because the wherewithal being plaster belongs to those who created it, not government.
But if conservatives awaken all such spreading by rule "socialism," that becomes a classification that no longer classifies: It includes almost everything, including the refundable overload honesty on which McCain's form heedfulness scheme depended. Hyperbole is not harmless; rash idiom bewitches the speaker's intelligence. And falsely shouting "socialism!" in a crowded theater such as Washington causes an pandemic of yawning. This is the only dominating industrial guild that has never had a hefty socialist champion ideologically, signification candidly, committed to redistribution of wealth.
This is partly because Americans are an aspirational, not an green-eyed people. It is also because the socialism we do have is the clandestine socialism of the strong, e.g. sugar producers represented by their Washington hirelings.
In America, socialism is un-American. Instead, Americans barely do rent-seeking -- bending direction for the advantage of solitary factions. The disagreement is in degree, including the extent of candor.
The rehabilitation of conservatism cannot begin until conservatives are plain about their complicity in what regime has become. As for the president-elect, he promises to alteration Washington. He will, by making matters worse. He will whet rent-seeking by decree strange ways -- this will not be temperately -- to expand, even more than the au fait government has, government's clout on spreading the mine around. Write George Will at Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071.
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