(3) The lie that we could cure our economic ills by slashing government regulation and spending, through the twin miracles of deregulation and trickle-down economics.
While much has been written about this lie--and much more needs to be said in order to give it the burial it deserves--there's a deeper aspect that is seldom discussed. It's not just regulation is absolutely vital if the economy is to be the servant of society rather than the master. Nor is it just that conservatives don't actually cut government budgets--much less deficits. No, the deeper point is that massive government deficits--which conservatives purportedly abhor, yet always produce--are actually a pathological form of Keynesian economics, the very core of the liberal economic philosophy that conservatives are supposedly opposed to. Thus, even the limited success that conservatives sometimes can claim for job growth, rising GDP or whatever, is due to them following fundamentally liberal economic policies, however bastardized and distorted those policies may be in the particular forms they are twisted into.
