The right and hypocrisy

Gherald makes an important point:

There are two mutually-exclusive possibilities. Either:

1) Republicans did govern conservatively, and their genuine conservative solutions failed.
2) Republicans stopped governing conservatively ("lost their way"), and genuine conservative economic principles haven't been operative for the last decade.

He adds the necessary caveat:

Admittedly, this is a little too neat. Perhaps half their ideas have been a failure, and the other half have were hypocritically untested, or some other proportion.

I'll admit that the notion of conservatism as fiscal austerity--let's just say the domestic/discretionary spending aspects of Goldwaterism--were not operative during the Bush years. Liberals hate those ideas but nobody that I know of is really blaming these ideas for the collapse. However, the deregulation aspects of conservatism, going back to Goldwaterism, have definitely and predictably failed us. Such ideas emanate from the notion that capitalism is, in some way, an extension of nature and therefore self-correcting. Sometimes it does this, but capitalism isn't natural--it's a system we've constructed based on assumptions and principles (such as the rational economic actor model) that don't form a completely perfect system, but for all intents and purposes, it's good enough most of the time. Herb Simon proved this in the 1970s and got a Nobel for his work. Capitalism is the ultimate satisficing system, and as it was created by humans it will inevitably have flaws, since we're all flawed people. I'm ambivalent toward capitalism in general, but I appreciate that it produces efficient outcomes and with some government intervention it can produce broadly shared prosperity. The same cannot be said of agrarianism, mercantilism, or communism, so I guess that means that I'm a capitalist by default.

The hypocrisy on the right, as I see it, is mostly limited to the following groups (okay, that's too broad, so let's limit this to economics):

1. People who give earnest pleas about how deficit spending is "destroying our children's future" (what sort of future will they have if there's a multiyear depression that destroys the economy?) while never having raised a peep during the enormous deficits Bush spent during a time of relative peace and prosperity. Yes, that $1 trillion deficit was Bush's TARP program, which had nothing to do whatsoever with Obama. Bush could easily have balanced the budget at any number of points during his term, but he didn't. It would have meant less gaudy tax cuts for the rich, or actually asserting a firm hand on pork barrel spending with Congress. Bush did neither.
   
   
2. People who insisted that we should let the banks do whatever they wanted, free-market, laissez-faire and then started insisting that we bail their asses out when things inevitably went wrong. Larry Kudlow comes to mind for this category. To be fair, most Republicans in Congress opposed the bailouts. This is, at least, a consistent position. But a lot of them didn't and never really gave an accounting for why they acted as they did, aside from Alan Greenspan.

These people should have scorn heaped upon them. Of course, there are many other examples of this on the right--for example, how we went into Iraq in part because of Hussein's torturing and then became arch practitioners of torture ourselves. And there's clearly hypocrisy in terms of how Palin's daughter was treated by the same right that called Dina Lohan's youngest daughter a slut and a whore for doing the same damn thing. Oh, I could go on and on. But in terms of the economic element that Gherald is talking about, that's how I see it.