David McElroy

Lack of honesty in communication bugs me, but it’s also something I understand very well. As a longtime political consultant, I’ve been guilty of saying things to the public to push emotional buttons at times.

So I’m not sure whether to be disgusted or feel professional admiration for the public relations people at the Federal Emergency Management Agency who are responsible for morphing government bureaucrats into our “federal family.”

According to the Palm Beach Post, FEMA has pretty much banished the word “government” from its news releases. In its place, you’ll find talk of the “federal family,” as though they’re going to take us on vacation when school gets out.

It’s definitely creepy and kooky, but there’s nothing mysterious about it. They’re not the Addams Family. They’re just politicians twisting the meaning of words.

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A lot of people I know who say they love liberty still vote for Republicans and seem to have faith that doing so will bring about individual freedom. Given the abundant evidence that this isn’t true, I can’t figure out why they keep doing it.

I was closely associated with Republican candidates for all of my professional political career and for most of my life before that. So if I were going to identify with one of the mainstream parties — at least in culture and history — it would be the Republicans.

But I’ve learned that Republicans are very good at rhetoric about freedom — and I used to write some of that rhetoric — but not so good at delivering the goods. They talk about liberty (especially the economic kind) but when push comes to shove, they’re just as bad about setting up new rules to force people to act in ways they approve of. This is very obvious to anyone who’s paying attention, so why do so many of my fellow liberty-loving friends keep heading down the path where they’re going to be given condescending nods at election time, but ignored when actual day-t0-day laws and regulations are being written?

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Ever since the dying days of the lame duck Bush administration, federal officials and their friends at the Fed have been chanting incantations from the Book of Lord Keynes in a frantic effort to “stimulate” the U.S. economy. Like voodoo priests convinced of their power, these Keynesians aren’t going to let actual results get in the way of their faith in voodoo.

The U.S. government announced this morning that job growth in the country was the worst last month that it’s been since 1945. There were zero net jobs created in the country. The situation is bad and getting worse. Once again, we see that the voodoo economics of Keynes doesn’t work. It never has worked even once, but its practitioners won’t be dissuaded from their faith.

I can almost write the response from people such as Paul Krugman. I haven’t seen a statement from him yet, but it’ll probably be something along the lines of this: “The government hasn’t yet spent enough money to stimulate the economy. It’s not that we’re doing the wrong things. It’s that the Obama administration is kowtowing to Republicans by failing to spend enough. If we would just spend more money — on digging ditches or gearing up to fight off an alien invasion, for instance — there would be no more problem.”

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