A common conservative cornerstone is the free market. Rather than relying on state intervention, markets must be competitive and only be driven by self-regulating Invisible Hand. Minimal mix-ins of government intervention, like contract law and property rights enforcement are necessary evils, but the overarching theme is that he who makes the better widget more efficiently succeeds against the less adept.
Competition, or at least the opportunity to complete, is vital free market component. That said; please consider for a moment how free market conservative heroes like Rush Limbaugh, Ayn Rand and their admirers would view government sole-sourcing and no-bid contracts. Would they not consider this an utter abomination?
It seems that such an act is not an abomination due to the American Conservative’s selectively short memory. Officials from two quite contemporary right-leaning, quasi-conservative presidential cabinets that dubiously claim to be free-market advocates and frugal government proponents have on several occasions awarded no-bid contract contracts to the engineering/private military firm currently known as KBR, Inc. True, it may be unnecessary to conduct formal bidding processes for such mundane activities like aluminum siding installation, or basic plumbing repairs, but these no-bid contracts approved by presidential cabinet officials (some of whom had coincidentally served on KBR and its parent company’s board of directors) are for ongoing projects like Restore Iraqi Oil and various military support services with program costs well into the billions.
Countless other free market abuses exist. For example, the George W. Bush’s Food and Drug Administrator (FDA) nominee, Dr. Lester Crawford plead guilty to lying about the stock ownership of companies that he was supposed to impartially monitor as Commissioner of the FDA. Kyle “Rusty” Foggo helped orchestrate bribes of over $2.3 million from major republican donor Brent Wilkes that lead to preferential allocation of Federal Defense Department contracts. And this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg; most of these facts and figures were accessed in seconds by entering “republican scandals” in a simple Google search.
Please do not interpret this article of a sole Republican Party indictment. Greed is in human nature and will forever transcend its way across party lines. Capitalism is not perfect, and it is our best economic model, but in reality pure Capitalism is more fictitious than the Tooth-Fairy. Your writer is simply irked by the Republic Party’s blatant hypocrisy. The GOP has long proclaimed to be stalwarts of the free market economy. High profile Republicans, like Mitt Romney describe the Chrysler and GM bailouts as “not a success because the bailout program wasted a lot of money,” and quip further, stating it was the “wrong way to go” and encouraged the process of American ingenuity rather than government as a means to guide the economy. A neutral point of view would clearly see that infatuation with free market ideals is a marriage of convenience and not true love. Rather than it being a right-wing cornerstone, the Republican Parts is “Capitalist when Convenient,” or in other words, Laissez Faire-Weather Friends.
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