From a comment on the Tea Party policies

[fpb]

95% of American so-called conservative policy is nonsense. If you want to cut public expenditure, legislation and what are known as "cuts" are the bluntest and most damaging of blunt instruments. The very fact that Republicans talk about cutting federal departments as the measure of saving shows that they have not begun to understand the problem.

Comments

[shezan]

You're right in theory and wrong in practice. Savings are NEVER made by mature organisations.

[fpb]

I don't accept that use of the word never. I simply don't believe that people are trapped by being in "mature" organisations or any other kind of organisations. It is, of course, a very good excuse for sloth - things will never change anyway....

[ravenclaw_eric]

I could also point out that "government," in the US, can mean the Federal, State, County or city/local government...and that ever since WWII, the Federal government has taken more and more power unto itself, power that used to be exercised at lower levels

[fpb]

I won't say I disagree, but blunt and unthinking hostility does not work either.; There are some cases in which I would say that one department of state should be got rid of, In the case of America, I have serious doubt on the federal Department of Education. The old American systems, whatever their faults, created one of the best educated populations on the planet, and some of the best universities. Was there a driving need to subject them all to a single authority? No, I don't think there was, and I don't think results have been so splendid either. But if you get rid of the Department of Education, you have to go through the following steps

[ravenclaw_eric]

Believe me, I know from "blunt and unthinking hostility to government." Trust me on this---I know people whose attitude toward the government, any government, makes the Tea Party look like so many North Koreans praising the Great, Dear and whichever-one-they've-got-now leaders.

A lot of hostility comes from bad experiences with government. Were I, for example, a medical marijuana patient whose supply was constantly being interrupted, in open defiance of the clear will of the people of my state expressed at the polls, by the Feds, I would be ill-disposed to the Federal government, to say the very least. Multiply that by myriads of other examples and what you see as blunt and unthinking hostility is, at least, explicable. (Being much closer to the phenomeon, myself, my view is much more nuanced. Kind of like Italian or British domestic politics...I'm sure that your view of them is much more in-depth than mine, simply because you're a lot closer to them