Pork Spending: Schofield’s Screed

Schofield over at Policy Watch can’t even let our pork report go without shrieking his objections. In his "reality check," he attempts to compensate for his lack of intellectual firepower by thumbing through his thesaurus and including as many inflammatory adjectives he can find. Here is the final tally:

Schofield describing our ideology: "Far Right," "extreme, market fundamentalist right," "cramped and bizarre worldview" 

Schofield describing the pork report: "half-baked," "misidentify and mischaracterize," "recklessly tarring," "harmful libel," "absurd," "just plain wrong," "attack," "slimed," "flat wrong," "sloppy and inaccurate attacks," "Ill-conceived," "obvious and egregious errors," "slapdash, ideological diatribe"

It seems to me he needs to cloak his "analysis" with such flowery language in order to assure himself he possesses exclusive rights as a moral authority, and anyone he disagrees with should be either silenced or shamed.

Oddly enough, he barely stops short of defending wasteful government spending on the grounds that "waste, fraud and abuse have always been with us." So I guess it should just continue? Not very "progressive" to advocate the status quo.

He continues:

Think that waste is only a phenomenon of government? Then read some of the descriptions of the lavish spending practiced by America’s new “imperial CEO’s” or the vast sums that cycle through our bloated pharmaceutical industry.

What he doesn’t understand is the fact that the market punishes excess on the part of private companies. Such CEO’s end up in jail, are fired, or punished by fed-up consumers who are free to spend their money elsewhere. What happens when government wastes money? It simply rewards itself with more of our tax dollars.

The main point that needs to be made is this: Collectivists such as Schofield do not hesitate when advocating the use of force by government to take tax dollars and divert them to projects and causes they deem "worthy." He defends items we identified in the report as pork on the basis that he deems them "worthy initiatives." Guess what, there are countless other nonprofits devoted to very worthy causes that don’t receive tax dollars. In fact, I can think of several I would prefer to support – and this list likely wouldn’t include any of Michaux’s pet groups who are happy to engage in political quid pro quo. Even if we were to suppose that government may justifiably support non-profit organizations, wouldn’t it be better to have a comprehensive (competitive) grant process rather than allowing certain politicians to divert funds to their favored organizations?

What people like me with "bizarre worldviews" oppose is a government that has such omnipotence to decide for us which causes are worthy, and then take our money by force in order to fund them. Where is the social justice in that?

Schofield exemplifies hypocrisy by claiming our Pork Report should be labeled "things we don’t like" and then goes on to defend certain items because they are "things he likes." Some reality check. Our point is not that we "don’t like" such causes, it’s that we want to be free to choose for ourselves which causes are worthy of support. Never mind that it’s dangerous for nonprofits to become dependent on the government for funding – a dependency that will cause them to become complacent, less responsive to those in need and less innovative.