When Conservative Theory Collides With Unconservative Reality

It’s always amusing when someone who has not been an active conservative and free marketer for over 40 years and did not run his own small business for nearly 30 years, as I have, gets accused of being a socialist because he refuses to pretend that the world is not as it is. I like free enterprise. It’s in my blood – everyone in my nuclear family had his/her own business. And while I am not sure that Donald Trump‘s latest heresies to the Cult of Milton Friedman (and I’m definitely a Friedman believer) will ultimately prove efficacious, I know the current system certainly isn’t doing the job for us. And the current system isn’t anything like free enterprise.

I’m tired of the unprincipled application of conservative principles. What we have here are many conservatives making the same fundamental error that they make about so many other things. They are assuming the world is as they wish it to be, not as it is. They are mad because real life is screwing up the application of their beautiful theories – and again, I want to emphasize, I love these theories. I would love to have a system where the courts do the courts’ proper things, the Congress does the Congress’s proper things, and the president does the president’s proper things, but that’s not our system. I would love to have a system where immigration is rationally handled both for input and output, but that’s also not the system we have. And I would love to have as free a market as humanly possible. I would also like a pony.