Big Government and Big Military

Conservative Contradictions, Volume 2: Big Government and Big Military

Conservatives supposedly wish to reduce the size and expenditures of the government. The brilliant idea here is that bureaucracies are inherently self-serving and wasteful. Therefore, the government should be harshly scrutinized and criticized, and then strangled or drowned in a bathtub.

However, the most expensive and most physically powerful human institution ever created-- the present American military-- is never questioned by the compassionate conservative in terms of its motivations or its efficiency.

The military is run by a team of angels and housewives hand-picked by god, since it escapes all bureaucratic indictment. The military is not an institution, just as ancient Egypt is not African. They are both wonderful dreamworlds that exist in their own private universe.

Institutions, departments, governments, and everything else of the sort, have no scruples and inevitably fall prey to boundless human imperfection and corruptibility. A military however, has every scruple in the book. Nothing to see here. (In fact, all authoritarian institutions will be equally immune. For example, police forces.)

While any item that is, or resembles, an institution is fretted over and rushed at with axes like an overgrown forest of weeds, the single most imposing institution in history receives a halo and is excused from all the obvious failings that would be presumed for any other public organization.

Next Edition: The American Experiment, which is a golden god-blessed paradise on the peak of an Olympian hill, is so fantastic because the government is reducible to its people. At the same time, its government is a devilish plague.