I agree with Bruce Bartlett half the time

1. This is very bad:
Conservatives must adapt to welfare state By BRUCE BARTLETT | 1/26/09 4:41 AM EST http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/17936.html

Bruce Bartlett's counsel is fatally flawed. He may be correct that Reagan saw the opportunity to grow the economy faster than the government could grow. But 20 years later, conditions have changed. 2 successive bubbles and otherwise anemic growth lead me to conclude the stuff necessary for real economic growth is missing. What does the US produce for export? Which industries are poised to grow? Government is the only one that comes presently to mind. At the same time, Mr. Bartlett mentions the impending exponential growth in government spending that will accompany the Baby Boomer retirement wave. So, we have the economy growing slowly if at all and government spending growing increasingly fast. And how high can taxes go before they severely limit economic growth? Europe gives us a vision of our future 5 or 10 years hence. No growth, crumbling social services, people dying of heat or cold, unrest caused by unemployment. If Bartlett thinks Republicans must sign on to this encroaching Socialism in order to return to and stay in power. But it begs the question, why would anyone desire to preside over the collapse of country?

If, over the course of the next couple of years, the Republican Party decides to follow this path of accommodation to ruinous policies that are anathema to the Conservative principles upon which this country was founded and rose to greatness, I will not have left the Republican Party, it will have left me.

2. This is very good:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/01/22/stimulus-keynes-taxes-oped-cx_bb_0123bartlett.html

"Eventually, economists came to understand that vast numbers of individuals and businesses throughout the economy don't make exactly the same mistakes simultaneously unless something has changed the rules of the game. Government isn't always responsible--bubbles can occur on their own, as they have over the centuries--but systemic errors usually result from government policy."

"The Federal Reserve, our nation's central bank, is the institution mainly responsible for altering the terms of trade. That is because it has the power to change the value of the currency, which is the intermediary in every single economic transaction, and also to alter the terms of every intertemporal transaction--those between the present and future, such as saving today to consume tomorrow--by raising or lowering the interest rate.

No one today believes that the Great Depression just happened or dragged on as long as it did because the private sector kept making mistake after mistake after mistake. It only made them and continued to do so because government interfered with the normal operations of the market and prevented readjustment from taking place."