Jon Talton, AZ Republic business columnist, posts a take on Jeff Flake's pronouncement to "never again to ask federal budget appropriators to fund any item or project". In my view, though I disagree with his far right politics, he is taking a courageous stand in separating himself from the rest of the Republicans, who prattle endlessly about "limited government", yet don't walk the walk. As Talton notes, the Republicans have held Congress for eight years and yet the federal budget is bigger than ever. However, Talton takes Flake to task for his "utopian conservatism, seeking a Jeffersonian world that never existed".

America has already experimented with the kind of weak government that Flake seems to advocate, with the Articles of Confederation. Its failure led to the strong Constitution of 1789. Hamilton, not Jefferson, prevailed. From the start, Washington energetically funded public works, infrastructure and territorial expansion. And it intervened in the market.

Capitalists shunned the transcontinental railroad until the government backed it. The breadbasket of the Great Plains was not economically viable until the government conquered the Indian nations. Slavery didn't collapse from its economic inefficiencies but from the thrusts of federal bayonets. America's transformation to an industrial giant was forged as much by the Republican tariff as by heroic industrialists.

I'm sure there was some stirring in the seats at the Goldwater Institute at Talton's closing words, though it's on the mark in my estimation (well, except for the Ashcroft line...).

The daily arguments over government are often trivialized by Cold War language. John Ashcroft isn't leading "the secret police." And federal funding of transit isn't "socialism." The best evidence shows that free markets thrive in partnership with government, including with infusions of what Flake would call "pork."

The new Big Argument should be about whether economic theory is a wise guide for America. Many events called inevitable because of "the economics" are really about monopolists gaming public policy to kill competitors.

The conceit that every human breath and aspiration can be valued in the marketplace should chill us all. It risks becoming the new totalitarianism.