The Self-Hating State--"deep streak of perversity" of administration

[Gloria]

Great read from a great site....Foreign Policy in Focus

http://www.fpif.org/fpifzines/wb/4150

The Self-Hating State

The state, according to classical liberals, is a problem. It meddles in the economy. It over-regulates. Through the tax system, it robs Peter to pay Paul. If only the state would get out of the way, these purists argue, then the invisible hand of the market would magically set things right. Equilibrium would reign, and the gross national happiness of the country would rise like the temperature on a warm, summer day.

The Bush administration presides over a state. It negotiates with other states on an hourly basis. But the current administration harbors a deep streak of perversity: it is a self-hating state.

The Bush crowd has spent the last six years undermining virtually all state functions with the possible exception of government surveillance and, of course, the Pentagon budget. It has weakened regulatory agencies, cut back social programs, slashed taxes for the wealthy, blurred the division between church and state, and opened up natural preserves to corporate exploitation. This campaign has been nothing less than an attempt to unravel the Great Society programs of the 1960s, rewind the New Deal legislation of the 1940s, and "roll back the 20th century," as William Greider wrote in a powerful piece in The Nation in 2003.

This hatred of state spills across borders. The Bush administration aspires to erode state power globally. This peculiar aspect of the self-hating state, alas, has won bipartisan consensus. For the last two decades, the United States has supported programs of economic reform that have significantly reduced state power throughout the world. Whether bilaterally or through international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, Washington has pushed other states to privatize their assets, reduce barriers to the flow of capital, and cut back on social expenditures. This "Washington consensus" predates the Bush administration by many years and threatens to outlive its tenure as well.

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[Odin2005]

1. Never let people who hate the government run the government.

They will intentionally break things and start screaming about how the government programs they broke don't work.