Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform, inventor of the “starve the beast” approach to government, and hater of all things that aren’t middle or upper class, showed in today’s Wall Street Journal why he is so terrible. As he was shoveling snow outside ATR’s headquarters, he said:
“Think about it…a government which can’t plow the streets and can’t fix the potholes wants to tell us how our toilets should flush, what size cars we should drive and whether we should paper or plastic when we buy our groceries.”
Let’s ignore the piss-poor parallelism of his statement, as well as his conflation of local and national government initiatives, because that is mostly stupid, as opposed to mean, to focus on the substance of his remark. Because what he is saying is that since he and his fellow low tax crusaders have starved governments of the revenue needed to perform basic services (eg. plowing snow), government is therefore incompetent, and thus shouldn’t be trusted to do anything. I know, that is the entire modus operandi of starving the beast, but rarely do you get him to say it so clearly and cruelly.
Thoughtbasket 