New Post! Big Government!

So I have not written a blog in a long time and I did rather like the short debate that took place on my old post between Ryan and Matt, but I guess since they both did agree on me making a new post I will do just that.

Please bear with me as this train of thought has not fully been run through yet on my part, and I am writing this mostly as a way of getting my thoughts out there and working though them.

So I have been reading UST's paper, The Aquin, for quite some time now and most of the time its interesting to read about what is going on and all the "controversies" that may be arising at any given time; but I have never considered them a "liberal" news source. Well yesterday I found a paper on my dorm room doorstep, this paper proclaimed itself to be the "conservative" UST paper, which made me wonder if my Aquin was indeed liberal. I digress though, the point is that I was looking over this "conservative" student newspaper and reading some article about big government not being the goal of the constitution when it was written. More or less it just talked about the big government versus small government stuff that most of us have heard several times before and this got me thinking about government "size".

Today in my poli sci class the topic was political economies, nothing really to do with big government or little government, and port control was mentioned which harkened my memory back to the whole government size issue, and it seems that the Republican Party has found themselves in a kind of contradiction when government size is concerned.

So try and follow me here as I attempt to stumble through this; the Republican Party (hereafter RP) criticizes the Democratic Party (hereafter DP) for their attempted involvement in everything, claiming that it is not the role of government to be that involved in what people should be able to handle themselves. So the RP is for smaller less involved government, and along with that lower tax, due to a lack or required funding. Knowing this basic premises it seems odd to me that the RP of this current administration is taking on such a high number of DP big government ideas; that is not to say the RP is for social programs and increased taxes, but rather for "safety" and increased prices.

One good example that is a current issue has to do with the Dubai Port Company and their buy out of a British company who was in charge of many of our large container ports. So with a large amount of our shipping ports being controlled by and Arab country, never mind that they are one of our most friendly Arab countries in that whole region, our president and the RP want to say that they (Dubai) can not have that type of foothold in our country. The proposed solution is to make large container shipping ports directly under government control in the interest of "safety". The same solution has been proposed, and is still being proposed by many RP members, for airport security.

I am not entirely sure I have given you enough to see what I am thinking, but in short the anti big government RP is attempting to increase the governments relative size dramatically by taking control of something that has been a private industry for the last 250 years. Would the RP increase taxes to cover these new costs? Probably not, that money would just go into our national debt (kind of ironic if you really think about what that debt is) but at the same time the US Government is not equipped to deal with the shipping industry and would not be able to manage our ports at the same low costs as the current outside companies can; what does that mean for you and me? The handbag that came from China that cost $15 jumps up in price to $20 to cover the increased port fees. So no we are not being taxed more but we sure as heck are paying more.

I guess my overall point is that the RP for all of their small government aims, for their mantra of "is it really the governments job to handle that?" has taken some pretty big steps in increasing the size of government under the ruse of "safety".