Consider the following Article:

Right-wingers have run U.S. into the ground
HARRY BRUCE:Halifax Chronicle Herald
Sun. Apr 19 - 5:17 AM


WHILE self-righteously denouncing "Big Government" as a brother-in-crime of Commun-ism, the U.S. champions of "market-based solutions" certainly found solutions to their own financial problems.

Their ideology, in which deregulation and privatization were holy doctrine, amounted to a religion for the greedy. In the past quarter-century, this faith so dominated business and politics down there that its priests piled up enormous wealth for themselves and, at the same time, complacently watched a deterioration of the well-being of tens of millions of their fellow Americans.

"The modern conservative," wrote the Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith, "is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Not only in the U.S. but among the meaner varieties of conservatives in Canada, that search, which includes the cursing of Big Government, has been vigorous and influential. Most Canadians, however, at least know that it was Big Government that gave them railroads, air travel, radio, TV, unemployment insurance, pensions, medicare, and a whole lot more.

Were it not for huge spending initiatives by government, over several generations, we would be nowhere near as well off as we are. As economist Jeff Madrick proves in his new book, The Case for Big Government, Americans, too, owe much of their prosperity to almost two centuries of enormous public spending.

Such talk is heresy to the conservative ideologues who've held power in Washington for three decades. But what did these vicious crackpots and money-grubbers bequeath to President Barack Obama?

By comparison with the rest of the industrialized world, the U.S. now has the biggest income gap between the rich and poor, the highest rate of infant mortality, the highest rate of poverty among minors, the highest percentage of children unlikely to reach 60, and by far the highest percentage of its own people languishing in jail.

While setting these dubious records, the U.S. allowed its infrastructure to collapse like an old wooden house infested with termites. "For decades now, we have been witnessing the slow, ruthless dismantling of the nation's urban infrastructure," the New York Times recently reported. "The crumbling levees in New Orleans are only the most conspicuous evidence of this decline: it's evident everywhere, from Amtrak's aging track system to New York's decaying public school buildings."

If the neglect of dikes, bridges, highways and sewers is a grim reality for America, the erosion of its standards of education is even grimmer.

"All signs point to a deterioration in the quality of American schools," Harvard professor Henry Lee Shattuck writes. "Europeans and Asians alike have rapidly expanded their educational systems over the past 50 years. In the U.S., stagnation if not decline has been apparent at least since the 1970s. Even our high school graduation rates are lower today than they were a decade ago."

Today's Americans work harder and longer than both today's Europeans and yesterday's Americans, but their wages, on average, have been stuck in a rut for decades. Since the 1970s, writes Harvard lecturer Richard Parker, "the U.S. economy has grown more slowly than in the 30-year period after the end of World War II, but also very likely more slowly than in any other period in the nation's history."

"Real wages stagnant as corporate profits soar," read a headline in the Oakland Tribune. That was in 2006, but the reality it describes began to take shape when American voters, suckers that they were, in 1980 elected as their president that smiling, avuncular, and faithful ally of the rich, Ronald Reagan.

While scorning Big Government, his administration and those of his successors went about ruling the home of the brave and the land of the free as though they didn't really care how big government got — just as long it was government of the affluent, by the affluent, and for the affluent.

This is hard to believe, but some champions of the conservative ideology still think they were right. To mark the ascension of Obama to the presidency, William Kristol of the New York Times actually wrote, "All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20 marked the end of a conservative era. Since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too!"

Oh, please, Mr. Kristol. If the dominance of conservatives was a good thing for the U.S., so was the attack on the World Trade Centre, the war in Iraq, hurricane Katrina, and the hatred of America that has blossomed all around the world.