GOP debate good, but where is the conservative outcry?

The Grand Ole Party debated on CNN and YouTube Wednesday night (full downloads are available on both sites). While the Republicans barbed with one another, I personally thought the debate was missing some much needed conservative rhetoric. Even ultra-libertarian Ron Paul was too focused (again) on foreign policy isolationism, obfuscating his message of reduced federal impingement on society.

As an example, one question Wednesday night dealt with the issue of NASA funding and a possible trip to Mars in 2020. Responses given by Governor Huckabee and Congressman Tancredo were too focused on Federal spending for my taste (Huckabee for it and Tancredo against it). Rather, as a conservative, I would have liked the answer to be restricted privatization of the entire federal program. We all know that NASA has been hemorrhaging dollars and I argue that it suffers from a lack of “creative destruction.” I say that NASA as a whole is too much of a state program and needs to be put into the hands of society and the marketplace itself.

By allowing NASA (or multiple derivatives thereof) to operate privately with obvious restrictions and allotments for national security (much like the current port systems or critical infrastructure base in this country), we will be able to allow market forces to drive technological advances in space exploration and discovery. Living in an Internet age, all of us should be able to identify the power of such forces. Can you image if the Internet were truly invented by life-long liberal politician Al Gore? We would all be on dial-up, chatting to one another and paying a tax to the National Organization for Telecommunications and Media Emissions (NOTME).

Seriously, we need to be focusing on more ways to pull power back from the state, which has been creating net after net of social programs aimed to pull power and responsibility away from society. Another direct example brought up Wednesday from a viewer in Pittsburgh was our government’s response to lead in toys.

I would love to hear Albert J. Nock’s response to this. Clearly, Nock would point to the involvement of the state in federal oversight commissions over the last 75 years as taking away from the responsibility of resellers and distributors to be held accountable for the safety of toys on their shelves. Ask yourself, living in a world of a thousand federal commissions and the FDA, whom do you blame? Not Wal-Mart, not Tyco. No, it’s the government’s fault. Well my friends, as Nock would say, if we were not so reliant in 2007 on our government to protect us, maybe we would have already protected ourselves by creating an environment where resellers of goods that were unsafe would be facing the very real possibility of going out of business and thus would have instituted measures and safeguards long ago to privately account for the safety of their products.

To conclude, I will offer this final point for thought. In today’s “flat” world, we (society) need to learn to take back responsibility. I say this because our federal government cannot control the whole of the world (no matter how much we try). Therefore, as consumers, as explorers, as a civilization, we need to regain control of our societal power and bear the responsibilities of such a society. That was the essence of the conservative movement when Nock penned “Our Enemy the State” in 1934, and I argue it is as important, if not more so, in 2007.