Matt Yglesias points out that Rick Perry holds some astoundingly extreme opinions. Perry thinks that Social Security, Medicare, federal labor laws, federal environmental laws, federal banking regulation, and federal aid to education are all unconstitutional, and that global warming is a fraud.
Avik Roy responds that all of these borderline-crazy views are mainstream conservative views. For example, opposition to the use of the Commerce Clause is “about as mainstream of a conservative position on constitutional law as there is.”
That’s supposed to disprove Matt’s claim that Perry is spouting lunacy. All it proves to me is that the viewpoint now falsely calling itself “conservative” is not to be taken seriously.
Update Ezra Klein has more: Perry wants to repeal the 17th Amendment, returning the power to choose U.S. Senators to state legislatures. I suppose we’re not moving back to the Gilded Age fast enough to please Gov. BigHair.
Second update Perry scores a trifecta: Paul Krugman explains why Texas’s success in luring jobs from other states with lower wages and weaker regulations can’t be duplicated nationally. Can you say “Fallacy of composition”? I was sure that you could.
Reading “opposition to the use of the Commerce Clause” as “opposition to the EXPANSIVE use of the Commerce Clause” becomes… pretty much the mainstream direction the SC has been taking since Lopez. What’s the problem?
As well as what it was understood to mean for roughly 140 years.
If you view people who disagree with you as crazy, you spare yourself any obligation to confront them on an intellectual level, and risk possibly losing an argument. Diagnosing people instead of debating them is the lazy intellectual’s cop out.
If you can get them actually committed? That’s the intellectual’s equivalent of “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentations of their women.”
Anyway, to read comments at Yglesias’ site, is to be glad ‘liberals’ don’t have the power to commit their political foes.