The Incredible Fatuousness of Michael Steele
By Brian Beutler
When Ronald Reagan said “government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem,” it was a pretty bold statement. And for its boldness it helped form the basis of a generation of Republican political dominance. Perhaps that’s why, faced with the end of that dominance, some are wondering if maybe, possibly, Reagan didn’t go far enough:
Steele couldn’t praise them enough, and at times, he was at a loss for words. “You and I know that in the history of mankind and womankind, government—federal, state or local—has never created one job,” he said. “It’s destroyed a lot of them.”
I guess that means that when he was the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, he was unemployed. As were his staff members. As are, say, the 1.5 million or so active personnel in the Unite States armed forces. And so on and so on. All just as unemployed as the people who used to work for that great engine of job creation Lehman Brothers.
We all know whose interests most conservatives have in mind when they criticize the public sector. Sometimes it’s even defensible. As Matt notes below, there are functions that should be left to markets and functions that should be left to the government and functions where the choice isn’t all that clear yet, and when that’s the case we should experiment or debate or what have you. But you’d think that subtlety wouldn’t be lost on the new chairman of the Republican party, who, for some reason, thought it would be a good idea, on his first day out, to publicly insult the huge number of people who work for the largest employer in America.
78 Responses to “The Incredible Fatuousness of Michael Steele”
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January 31st, 2009 at 5:38 pm
You got to love a party who elects a guy Chairman who tried to hide he was a member last he ran for office.
January 31st, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Do you suppose its time to borrow one of those hysterically funny Limbaugh lines (because everyone knows he’s not a racist and he doesn’t really mean it) about him only being chosen because he’s, you know, black and they didn’t dare say no?
I mean, what’s fair is fair, isn’t it?
January 31st, 2009 at 5:54 pm
I’m a pretty liberal, pro-government guy, but I think you are dramatically oversimplifying Steele’s comment. He’s basically rehashing the conservative belief that ever dollar spent by the government destroys at least that amount in private market spending, and possibly much more depending on your faith in private market efficiency.
In other words, while government may have created his job as lieutenant governor, it probably required the sacrifice of at least one comparable private job in order to do so.
This perspective may or may not be true, and this current crises is bringing to the forefront that age old debate between private and public efficiency.
As a liberal, I think it best to (a) concede the point that the public sector is less efficient than the private sector (although possibly not true in some cases) and (b) argue that a healthy public sector creates (1) better paying jobs, (2) healthier externalities, and (3) a more fair and sustainable distribution of income.
Steele could be completely accurate in his comments and still be talking baloney.
January 31st, 2009 at 5:54 pm
efgoldman:
No. In addition to being racist and dickish (no matter how racist or non-dickish one’s intentions in saying such a thing), I can’t see how it’s better to do that than to simply point out that Steele is the Republicans’ internally-chosen standard-bearer and presumably represents the best in current Republican thinking on important issues like job creation. This seems 100% true to me, incidentally. It’s not as if the Republicans under any circumstances were going to pick somebody for RNC chair who was going to say anything any less idiotic. Who gives a shit about the other stuff?
January 31st, 2009 at 5:58 pm
I mean, what’s fair is fair, isn’t it?
No. While I’m always one for advocating disproportionate retaliation against Republican attacks, making racially snarky comments against a Republican isn’t justified even if right-wingers do it to Democrats.
The sad part is that Steele really was the best possible candidate of the lot for RNC chair. And he still sucks.
January 31st, 2009 at 5:58 pm
In the history of mankind? WTF? Was everyone in Soviet Russia unemployed? How many organized states have there been in which the public sector *isn’t* a major part of the economy?
January 31st, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Yes but ‘government’ in that sense, doesn’t mean Whitehall-esque administrative positions or vital state funded services such as the Army. And I’m sure that’s not what Mr. Steele meant by damning ‘government’, instead, he meant the bureaucratic nanny-state government which does its best to control peoples lives through quango (read tax-payer funded) jobs. Heavy CCTV, I.D. Cards, NHS, DNA databases, total access to mobile phone records(examples of big government programs from my country), are surely kind of government intervention that should be damned. And the idea that he’s actually chastising government istitutions’ is laughable, he’s no anarcho-liberatarian, he’s just a bog standard Reaganite-conservative.
January 31st, 2009 at 6:02 pm
I think they did vote for him because he was black. It’s like that scene in “Oh, brother where art thou” where they are bitching about the polls and one of them decides what they need to do is get their own midget.
Did you see the Next Right post where they describe their perfect candidate to win Pelosi’s seat and it’s a Vietnamese guy (named Kim I think!) and that element of his bio seemed to be inspired by the fact that their only bright spot of the electoral season was that one of them managed to unseat who got caught with a freezer full of cash money…who was Vietnamese!
These are some dull, dull, people.
January 31st, 2009 at 6:09 pm
I remembered it a little bit wrong, it was a Korean who they had named Wong. The point is that what they took away from the Cao election was that they ran an Asian and that’s why they won.
January 31st, 2009 at 6:10 pm
I guess Yglesias’ penchant for misspelling and typos follows on to his guest bloggers.
Pathetic.
January 31st, 2009 at 6:13 pm
“I remembered it a little bit wrong, it was a Korean who they had named Wong.”
I was wondering about that. “Kim” is a very unusual name for a Vietnamese person. Like about as common as “Gupta” is among the Irish.
January 31st, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Koreans named Wong aren’t any more common.
January 31st, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Whoa. A politician? Exaggerating? Impossible. You really showed this guy by taking his words literally and then pointing out a fact that nobody could disagree with.
well done.
We all learned something important here.
January 31st, 2009 at 6:43 pm
I guess Yglesias’ penchant for misspelling and typos follows on to his guest bloggers.
Pathetic.
Nothing more pathetic than making typos.
Actually, I suppose hanging out on the comments section of a blog you apparently hate complaining haughtily about typos might be just a bit more pathetic.
Maybe even more than a bit…
January 31st, 2009 at 7:11 pm
Wahts worng whit tpyos? Keep queit cnut.
January 31st, 2009 at 7:39 pm
@ 4 Brodysattva Says:
@ 5 Tyro Says:
Sorry. Or maybe not.
I’ve been watching the GOP since the days when they stood for something other than racism, religion and know-nothingism. I voted for people like Leverett Saltonstall, Ed Brooke and Frank Sargent.
The first presidential election for which I was eligible (voting age was still 21) was 1968: Nixon/Humphrey/Wallace. I have watched the GOP get ever more cynical and ever less interested in the welfare of the country and its polity over the decades. I really can’t intelligently discuss anything the GOP does anymore without going into full snark mode.
Steele may or may not have been the best choice for the job – I hadn’t followed it closely. But to suggest that THIS GOP, which worships at the alter of Palin and Limbaugh, did anything at all out of pure, non-cynical motives is just nonsense.
January 31st, 2009 at 7:53 pm
“Koreans named Wong aren’t any more common.”
I think “Wong” is just an Americanized “Huang”, which is quite common in Korea. I worked with a Korean doctor named “Wang”, but it was pronounced as “Wong.” A lot of Asian names get respelled during the immigration process, so “Wong” doesn’t surprise me.
January 31st, 2009 at 8:10 pm
The ignorance here is astonishing. The government does not create jobs nor wealth, it can only redistribute it.
How does the government get the money to pay the people it employs? It can only do so at the expense of the private sector. For every job that the government “creates”, the private sector loses one or more jobs.
January 31st, 2009 at 8:21 pm
When given a job between a government job or no job, most people will take the government job.
I’ve been reading about the CCC and the WPA lately, and it seems like we should be focusing on the value that government jobs can produce, especially where infrastructure and public land is concerned.
The government has also produced a lot of private sector jobs. Look at Halliburton. What has that gotten us?
January 31st, 2009 at 9:01 pm
It can only do so at the expense of the private sector. For every job that the government “creates”, the private sector loses one or more jobs.
Draw this out for me, econo-genious. Show me why every bit of tax revenue would have made a job in the private sector. No one wants to hear this bullshit anymore. It was tolerated when the machine seemed to be working, but it’s broke and it’s past time for you to realize it was always bullshit.
January 31st, 2009 at 9:11 pm
FYI, might want to listen to my exclusive interview with Michael Steele and comment. Thanks. JL.
http://www.theamericanview.com/index.php?id=1205
And forget, please, “conservatism,” please. It will not “save” us because it has been, operationally, de facto, Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson’s Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
“[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth.”
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
January 31st, 2009 at 10:02 pm
*crickets*
The religo-nuts have arrived. All hail Xenu.
Idiots aside, where does the government get the money to make all those shiny new jobs that people are always complaining about not paying as much as the private sector?
January 31st, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Travis, I really have to question your automatic assumption that the private sector is automatically more efficient than the public sector. At best, its true only in limited and special circumstances.
By and large, I think the truth is that the Public Sector has different criteria for performance and accountability than the Private Sector. That doesn’t necessarily make it better or worse. So its not really appropriate to measure the two by a biased yardstick. Indeed, the result we find when offloading public services or outsourcing or contracting out to the private sector, is frankly mixed and unpersuasive results in straight commercial performance terms, and usually very poor performance according to public sector criteria.
In any event, once private enterprises reach a certain point, they become effectively bureaucratized, the middle management and labour component has no stake, and performance is really not that much different.
But hey, congratulations on drinking the Kool-aid and still calling yourself a liberal.
January 31st, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Talk about a fatuous statement.
The notion that anybody in the GOP – a fucking POLITICAL PARTY – REALLY BELIEVES that government is an evil just boggles the mind.
Anybody stupid enough to believe that should be blogging here.
Oh, wait…
January 31st, 2009 at 10:24 pm
“Travis, I really have to question your automatic assumption that the private sector is automatically more efficient than the public sector.”
I also question that assumption, which is not Travis’s alone but widely held. Or is it an assumption? Is there empirical data that shows money spent in the public sector simply evaporates?
When we talk about the government creating jobs, it’s not just a matter of direct employment. There’s also the matter of government steering the economy where the private sector would not ordinarily have gone: submarine construction, for example, or rural electrification. Except those can’t possibly be examples, because government never creates jobs!
January 31st, 2009 at 10:28 pm
“Anybody stupid enough to believe that should be blogging here.
Oh, wait…”
What does that imply about the person that reads and comments on virtually every post of the blog whose author he thinks is idiotic?
January 31st, 2009 at 10:43 pm
I’ve been an electrical engineer in startups and in defense research (i.e., government dole). They each have their strengths.
Government research has done a lot of advanced seeding of ideas before anyone in their right mind would commercialize them. For example, MIT Lincoln Laboratory developed Reed-Solomon error correction in 1960, which now is used in CD/DVD/Blu-Ray playback and all sorts of digital communication.
However, ask government to make a small, low-power Reed-Solomon decoder, and they’ll deliver something the size of a Volkswagen bus in three years. Guys like AMCC and Motorola develop great technology themselves, but where they shine is delivering well-done implementations.
Start-ups deliver little twists on the state of the art that exploits niches that big companies don’t see or won’t pursue. For all the blather about “disruptive technology”, start-ups usually work on evolutionary changes to existing technology. Facebook may be fun, but not a technical revolution.
None of these segments work well without the other. Michael Steele is a glib jackass if he really believes what he says.
January 31st, 2009 at 11:09 pm
As a Maryland citizen, homeowner and business owner, I was impressed with Lt. Governor Steele. He and Ehrlich did a good job governing the State and it’s finances. He is competent, intelligent, experienced and the best candidate for the position, regardless of race.
January 31st, 2009 at 11:56 pm
Jobs are just a really silly metric of the economic well-being of a nation. You could easily create any number of jobs by having the government hire whoever to sit around all day. And even if the government taxes half of everyone’s income, it won’t destroy many private sector “jobs”, because the private sector can compensate by simply lowering wages.
The only two important economic metrics are production of goods and services, and distribution of goods and services. The amount of wealth you get to use is equal to the amount of wealth that gets produced times your share of production. Government spending and taxation can affect either production or distribution in either direction, but it’s not obvious how to optimize either (unlike “jobs”) which is why economic policy is difficult.
February 1st, 2009 at 12:44 am
Too many good comments here to hit them all. A couple:
1. That government can not create employment is just false rhetoric. Think defense spending. Living around Army bases and in acquisitions, I know first hand of many thousands of jobs created by the defense establishment. Add the indirect impact of direct government jobs on local economies and it can be very substantial.
2. A big difference between well-targeted and efficient(can’t assume this)government job creation and private is the private sector is looking for the immediate economic gain, while the government can be looking for overall social good. Another difference is the private is often more immediately measurable in terms of dollars. It is very difficult to measure the aggragate benefit to all users of a stretch of road, is much easier to measure how much money a company makes and who is employed there.
3. Before we get too aggressive w/attacking government as being inefficient w/ the money it gets for programs, we need to be comparing apples to apples. In the private sector where efficiency is touted, many businesses fail due to inefficiency or insufficient demand. Those businesses aren’t creating jobs and it took resources to try to get/keep them going. Government failures are just more public so more visible. Government programs are also guaranteed to get a great deal of scrutiny, so their deficiencies are out there for all to see.
February 1st, 2009 at 12:46 am
Interesting that Government destroys jobs. I live in a small town in southeastern Arizona, which would be a LOT smaller were it not for the army base and the hordes of contractors that support it. Almost every one of my co-workers would live somewhere else, if their jobs weren’t here.
February 1st, 2009 at 1:11 am
Yes, but we all know that “military spending” not only doesn’t count, but exists in a higher and nobler plane than government spending, and, furthermore, anyone who would dare question it is an America-hating traitor who doesn’t support the troops—those noble men whose jobs are not really jobs, really because their work is so noble and America-loving and patriotic that God Himself creates funding for it through a secret and numinous process that will be revealed to the faithful on the day of the Rapture.
February 1st, 2009 at 4:03 am
What, now we go and find our own “Magic Negro”?
This is a very, very sad day for America. The election of Steele proves that the Republican party will not go in the direction they need to for the sake of our country. They can expect to be in the minority for quite some time to come.
Are you a true conservative or just a kook aid drinker? If you are a true conservative then you would listen to what this other true conservative has to say about him.
What, now we go and find our own “magic Negro”?
This is a very, very sad day for America. The election of Steele proves that the Republican party will not go in the direction they need to for the sake of our country. They can expect to be in the minority for quite some time to come.
If you are a true conservative then listen to what this other true conservative has to say about him.
http://preview.tinyurl.com/deacesteelernc
He’s a RINO. On that we can be clear. This proves that the Republican Party’s move to the Left might be a permanent legacy of the Bush years.
February 1st, 2009 at 8:26 am
Steele is an unhinged right-wing Uncle Tom who was only picked by the Republicans because of his skin color and the thought by those kooks that he would represent a superficial “fresh start” to lure in folks besides old white men in the South.
Not going to work with this rhetoric that denigrates our beloved army and his past comments saying abortion is worse than the Holocaust.
http://www.sunstateactivist.org/ssablog
February 1st, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Is someone going to bother pointing out that the free market no longer produces sustainable jobs in this country either?
In the same way that the Great Society expenditures reached a diminishing return limit in the sixties, the Friedman/Reagan movement of hyper-free market economic policy has led us to our current condition where the job engine implodes and the ethical health of the economy is worsening.
Republicans are welcome to rail against “big government” because this is the tune they have been singing since the eighties, but they haven’t seemed to have caught on that their ideology and policies have failed in a definitive way and are just as bad as the most bloated government spending policy nightmare.
February 1st, 2009 at 2:54 pm
ssa–
As much as you disagree with the views of Michael Steele, it is not appropriate to use the term “uncle Tom” to shame black Americans the right to hold beliefs throughout the whole political spectrum. That is very disrespectful.
February 1st, 2009 at 3:36 pm
So Ted Haggard’s not the only evangelical who wants to kiss some boys, apparently….
February 1st, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Here’s a hint: when your ideology believes that anything is so neat and clean that there are 1:1 ratios between anything (such as here, a 1:1 ratio between the number of jobs created by government vs. the number of jobs that could have been created by the private sector that got crowded out), your ideology is based on foolishness meant to trick simpletons.
February 1st, 2009 at 4:19 pm
I disagree. There’s every reason to believe that Steele was chosen for his race. He has been, is, and will always be the GOP’s hood ornament. Wikipedia:
Given that Maryland is about 30% African-American, it makes sense for the GOP to keep at least one of them around.
February 1st, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Travis: what the hell are you talking about? Had there been no public lt. Gov., private industry would have come up with one? If governments fail to order projects (guns, roads, you name it), private industry will? We have thousands of years of history to disprove the contention that government stifles private iniative. Don’t even go back that far: look at what unregulated private indsutry has dome to the united states in the last 20 years! No more time need be wasted on such asinine contentions.
February 1st, 2009 at 10:24 pm
“What does that imply about the person that reads and comments on virtually every post of the blog whose author he thinks is idiotic?”
It implies that he thinks the author is idiotic and it’s personally amusing to demonstrate that to other readers while demonstrating his own massive wisdom.
That make ya happy?
February 2nd, 2009 at 10:38 am
isnt the largest employer in america wal-mart? i believe the second largest employer is the govt. not sure though…
February 2nd, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I d be curious to know how long exactly the “history of mankind” is for this man … 4000 years ?
I dont know him a lot and yet he seems to be as random and as full of Jesus as Sarah Palin is …
Will be a unbeatable team in 2012 …
Again GOP, wize choice …
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