The Sideshow kicks some history into certain bright eyed futurophiles:
Some “conservatives” think the Republicans are the party of New Ideas because they have no knowledge of history at all. They seem to regard things like SEC regulations and worker safety laws as though they have existed since Adam ate the apple, and imagine that if – for the very first time ever! – we got rid of them, we would suddenly live in a utopian free-market meritocracy. Their perspective is so narrow that they don’t even realize that their “new” idea has been around as long as there have been humans and still exists in many (most?) parts of the world, and that the world Franklin and Jefferson and FDR (and even LBJ) et al. wrought for us – the world they grew up in and always knew was better than all the others – is the genuinely new idea, and that it was working precisely because it was fine-tuned with all those fiddly little regulations and things. Yes, they require maintenance – you have to keep watching out for things like regulatory capture, you need accountability and public scrutiny to make sure that neither the government nor anyone else gets drunk with power – you remember that thing about “the price of liberty”, right?
But so-called “conservatives” have their dream of a kind of socio-economic perpetual motion machine that is somehow immune from natural laws, where entropy never sets in, where there are no such things as gravity and inertia, and where, by the way, rich men won’t cheat and poor people will just calmly sit by and watch their children starve to death rather than violate the mighty dicta of free-market values, secure in the knowledge that it’s just and right. (“Oh, gosh, I forgot to become immorally rich, so I guess it’s just my place to lie down and die while you sit there hoarding all the resources, more than any 600 really profligate people could ever possibly use in a lifetime….”)