alexis in the city

guest post: on limited government

(i’ve been thinking a lot about what limited government means to me, and i thought it would be interesting to get a bit of a different perspective, so i asked one of my favorite conservative friends/bloggers, curtis schweitzer, to contribute his thoughts on the subject.  i think from his post you’ll find it easy to see why he’s one of the most thoughtful, well-reasoned republicans i know :-).

The concept of limited or government is a popular one these days, which is something that might seem odd considering the balance of power in Washington. And yet, when we look at the over-arching viewpoints of the two major U.S. political parties, it starts to make more sense. After all, the traditionally more populist Democratic Party has recently made the influence of wealthy lobbyists one of the keystones of their campaigns, and while the expansion of the government in certain arenas might be a necessary byproduct of their political and philosophical outlook, the politicians in the Democratic Party– in particular Barack Obama– realize that “small government” is very complimentary to their agenda, and thus have (rather brilliantly) embraced those aspects of it which allow them to champion it without seeming self-contradictory.

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the bailout could end up making money

as the above image points out rather well (seriously, you should check it out in more detail), and as i’m constantly harping on and on about - very few things are black and white issues. in my experience, far too many people are far too eager to define things in one way or another: right/wrong, good/bad, liberal/conservative, etc. but life usually doesn’t just fit into neat little compartments like that and politics is no exception. things are messy - there are a lot of issues to consider, nuances to be explained, sides to hear, opinions to evaluate and so forth. the people i know of that tend toward viewing the world in terms of black-and-white-only tend to make up their minds to the exclusion of all else. once they believe something or someone is bad - or good (and i’m not even going to go into the ways they sometimes draw these conclusions) - that decision is there to stay.

unfortunately, this leaves little room for educated debate or reasonable discussion. in its place, you’re likely to get invalid arguments and various forms of logical fallicies - straw man, red herring and the like - thrown out in an attempt to detract from the subject at hand. one such example is the bailout. now, i should preface by saying that i’m not a fan of the way this legislation was conducted or the monsterous proportions to which it’s grown. but if ever there was an example of something that was incredibly nuanced, complicated and clearly not an  issue of black-and-white, this is it.

i’m not professing to be an expert or to understand exactly what’s going on here, but that’s just it. until you’ve really investigated something this in-depth, i don’t think you can draw the conclusion that it’s either right or wrong. and - here’s why i suspect deep down people really don’t WANT to do a lot of searching - following this potential investigation, you may draw a different conclusion than you did originally.

so back to the bailout - did you know that some of the bailout was loans? granted, this isn’t money the country may get back any time soon, but - as my title suggests - it’s a way in which the bailout could end up making money. take, for instance, a receiver of bail-out money, goldman sachs, who posted a profit:

The bank said it will use proceeds from the common stock offering plus “additional resources” to redeem the $10 billion it got from the U.S. Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

“The only toxic thing on their balance sheet is the TARP, and they want to get rid of that as soon as they can,” says Gary Townsend, president of Hill-Townsend Capital. The earnings show “they’re taking enormous market share away from virtually everyone else.”

crazy, right? yesterday’s tea parties proved to me even more that things are often much more complicated than we’d like them to be. by being over-eager to mis-name something as good or bad, we run into the problem of throwing out the good with the bad. and that’s a bad thing - we need all the good we can get.

my problem(s) with tax day tea parties

i wrote a guest post for a friend who’s providing all-day tea party coverage on his blog. here’s an excerpt:

i’m all for grassroots movements and i’ve been involved in quite a few myself. in fact, i was looking for a reason to join up with the tea party idea when i began my investigation but i never found such a reason. in fact, i didn’t find a lot other than people who were angry about taxes but didn’t really have a streamlined, applicable solution (a simple “cut taxes” is not a reasonable alternative to the problems we face). complaints with the inability or unwillingness to do anything about coming up with solutions, just sounds like whining to me.

read the rest here.

recession and … right-wing extremism?

this study was personally timely, given the fact that i found myself wishing i had a gun this morning, for likely the first time in my life (it had to do with an all-too-chirpy bird at 5 a.m., but don’t worry, i remain staunchly weapon-free). though my gun-totin’ desires had nothing to do with the recession, i don’t think,  a new report says that “Right-wing extremists in the United States are gaining new recruits by exploiting fears about the economy and the election of the first black U.S. president.” the article goes on to state that:

Such fears were driving a resurgence in “recruitment and radicalization activity” by white supremacist groups, antigovernment extremists and militia movements. It did not identify any by name. The Department of Homeland Security had no specific information about pending violence and said threats had so far been “largely rhetorical.” But it warned that home foreclosures, unemployment and other consequences of the economic recession “could create a fertile recruiting environment for right-wing extremists.” … Extremist groups are preying on fears that President Barack Obama, the first African American U.S. president, would restrict gun ownership, boost immigration and expand social programs for minorities.

even if obama does all those things, i don’t see how that’s a call for extremism - plus, the DHS says reports like these are done all the time and it’s no big deal. so, is it business as usual, or are people more fervently clinging to “their guns and religion?”

what i learned from my facebook fast

i probably spend more time on facebook than the average user. part of this isn’t my fault - i live online and some of my client work requires me to maintain a presence on several social networking sites, including facebook. but it’s true that i had become disproportionately wrapped up in certain aspects of the beast that is facebook - namely the debates and arguments and commence via the platform (or that were sometimes commenced by me …) so here are a few things i learned over the course of the past six weeks or so:

1. i was wasting a lot of time. i didn’t FEEL like i was because a few minutes here, half an hour there doesn’t really seem like that much when you’re logging on for snippets at a time. but i guess i didn’t realize how much it all added up. without the drama of facebook to distract me, i was able to accomplish a variety of other things.

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