Huckabee shows his true colors

During the early days of the Republican primary, I was reluctant to support Mike Huckabee because of what conservatives from Arksansas had to say about him. They accused him of being the Republican Party's answer to Bill Clinton, just without the sex scandals. That's the sort of thing that makes a conservative-leaning libertarian like myself think twice about a candidate. In a new interview, Huckabee has shown that if he were elected, chances are he would have been part of the problem, not the solution, as he clearly does not represent conservative positions:

Republicans need to be Republicans. The greatest threat to classic Republicanism is not liberalism; it's this new brand of libertarianism, which is social liberalism and economic conservatism, but it's a heartless, callous, soulless type of economic conservatism because it says "look, we want to cut taxes and eliminate government. If it means that elderly people don't get their Medicare drugs, so be it. If it means little kids go without education and healthcare, so be it." Well, that might be a quote pure economic conservative message, but it's not an American message. It doesn't fly. People aren't going to buy that, because that's not the way we are as a people. That's not historic Republicanism. Historic Republicanism does not hate government; it's just there to be as little of it as there can be. But they also recognize that government has to be paid for.

It wasn't obvious just how out of touch Huckabee is with the rest of the party until he started making comments like this. One can only surmise that if you think McCain is going to lead the Republican Party down a bad road if he gets elected, Huckabee would lead it right off the cliff! The primary reason why the Republican Party's base has been alienated from the party is because of the fact that under the last seven years of Republican "leadership" in the body politic the party has flat out rejected any pretense to libertarianism or limited government politics. This is the party that gave us the Medicare drug package, the farm bill, the Bridge to Nowhere^tm and the extremely expensive campaign in Iraq whose sole beneficiaries have been contractors like Halliburton and KBR.

One of the things that is extremely aggravating about people like Huckabee is that they are intellectual lightweights when it comes to hard subjects like how, exactly, America is going to pay for those "Medicare drugs" and other expensive programs. The Federal Reserve's claims to the contrary, money does not grow on trees. People like Huckabee from both parties have created a system between Social Security and Medicare that has about fifty to sixty trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities. He, and those like him, can engage in emotional hand-waiving and rhetoric about how rich America is, but the fact, as officially admitted by the federal government, is that all of America's combined wealth is not enough to pay even half of the unfunded liabilities just from Social Security.

Let me put it more bluntly for the people who don't understand economics at all. If the federal government nationalized every single piece of property owned by every single American, it would not cover even half of the debt that we have gotten ourselves into for just Social Security. That doesn't even cover military, civil service and state/local pensions.

If you have a breakdown in the social structure of a community, it's going to result in a more costly government ... police on the streets, prison beds, court costs, alcohol abuse centers, domestic violence shelters, all are very expensive. What's the answer to that? Cut them out? Well, the libertarians say "yes, we shouldn't be funding that stuff." But what you've done then is exacerbate a serious problem in your community. You can take the cops off the streets and just quit funding prison beds. Are your neighborhoods safer? Is it a better place to live? The net result is you have now a bigger problem than you had before.

This is an area where social conservatives tend to just not even listen to the arguments that libertarians make. Taking police off the streets is the last thing that libertarians support; policing is one of the few things that libertarians unequivocally support the government doing to the best of its abilities. Furthermore, libertarians tend to not favor many of the laws that conservatives like Huckabee support that end up creating the need for more government in the first place.

Most of the people in prison right now are in there because of drug-related offenses. If libertarians had their way, none of them would be in there for the drug crimes. Why, just imagine how much cheaper it would be for us to run government in America if drug users and drug dealers whose only offense is selling drugs weren't in prison! Why, there would be a whole lot of room for violent crimes in our prisons, and there would still be room for cutting budgets!

My experience in Arkansas was, a lot of the so-called conservatives said "Let's cut the budget." But they wanted to add prison sentences, they wanted to eliminate parole, they wanted to have harsher sentences for various crimes. And I said "OK, that's fine, but that's going to be expensive. So which do you want?" You can't have both, or you do what the federal government has done, and this is where I think Republicans have been especially irresponsible. Their approach has been [to] just kick the can down the road and let your grandkids pay for it.

Here Huckabee starts out with a good point, and then does not connect it to the very positions he supports. Let me say this again: Huckabee is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Following his approach on social spending issues, the Republican Party was forced to kick that can down the road in order to not get in even deeper trouble with its base by raising taxes. If the Republicans had actually run the government like libertarians while they had the resources to do so, the federal government would have been running a budget surplus, there would be fewer people in federal prisons, and the national debt would be shrinking, not growing substantially.

So they run up huge deficits ... but they've pushed those costs down to the states, and the states have to eat it, because they have to balance their budgets, they don't get to print money or borrow. Or the federal government just runs up more deficits and let's the next couple of generations worry about paying for all this stuff.

Either way, it's irresponsible, and I think people in America are smarter than that and they know that's not the responsible way to approach governing.

And this is key to why many of us rejected Huckabee. The man can see the trees, but not the forrest. He can point to every point in a graph, but remains unable to see the lines connecting them. On a meaningful level, Huckabee understands what is fundamentally wrong with the Republican Party on individual issues, but he is just incapable of actually stepping back and seeing how they come together. Fundamentally, he is a doctor who can rapidfire identify the symptoms without having a clue as to what the disease is.

Huckabee's positions just don't come together. You cannot coherently go off on fiscal discipline issues and then demand more government money be spent on the poor. The very reason that the federal government has such a flimsy operation today is due to the fact that the majority of its annual budget is spent on social welfare programs. About $1.8T of its $2.7T budget is social welfare spending. That ranges from education, to welfare, to food stamps, to Medicare. Yet that isn't even close to what continuing these policies over the next twenty years will require.