Excellent reply, thank you. I didn't really like the way he put his post and was trying to figure out how to respond when you nailed it.
I must confess that economics is not my thing. At the very least, I do not consider free enterprise and small, limited government to be the be-all and end-all of everything.
I am not a social Darwinist. I am not against "welfare." I'm not even against "affirmative action." There are far more important issues, such as the imminent wrath of the A-mighty for the moral cesspool our country has become--unfortunately, partly because Blacks and Hispanics have intentionally made an alliance with the forces of evil.
In Europe the "right wing" is far less libertarian economically (and the "left wing" is far less libertarian sexually). Compared to today's San Francisco, Communist Bulgaria under Todor Zhivkov was an ocean of sanity.
I do not come from the Jeffersonian political tradition but from the Hamiltonian. Unfortunately, about a hundred years ago (or perhaps at the New Deal) the Hamiltonian elites on the coasts junked their traditional conservatism for leftist radicalism, leaving the conservative movement with nothing but Jeffersonians to lead it. And I must confess that I do not have a great love of the Jeffersonians, with their economic dogmatism, their fanatical strict constructionism, and their notorious anti-moralism. The Jeffersonian does not care what you do so long as his tax dollars don't pay for it and consider any and all moral crusades (unless they are done in the name of local ethnic heritage rather than universal truth) left wing "nanny statism."
How I long for the resurrection of a Hamiltonian conservative leadership.