Protecting big business at all cost

This news story has been popping up all over blogotopia, first from The Carpetbagger Report:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration said Tuesday it will fight to keep meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease .

The Agriculture Department tests less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows for the disease, which can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. But Kansas-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef wants to test all of its cows.
Larger meat companies feared that move because, if Creekstone tested its meat and advertised it as safe, they might have to perform the expensive test, too.

The Agriculture Department regulates the test and argued that widespread testing could lead to a false positive that would harm the meat industry.

A federal judge ruled in March that such tests must be allowed. U.S. District Judge James Robertson noted that Creekstone sought to use the same test the government relies on and said the government didn't have the authority to restrict it.

The ruling was to take effect June 1, but the Agriculture Department said Tuesday it would appeal -- effectively delaying the testing until the court challenge plays out.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is linked to more than 150 human deaths worldwide, mostly in Britain.

There have been three cases of mad cow disease in the U.S. The first, in December 2003 in Washington state, was in a cow that had been imported from Canada. The second, in 2005, was in a Texas-born cow. The third was confirmed last year in an Alabama cow.

This is an excellent example (among many) proving the point that today's Republican party (and especially the Bush Administration) is not conservative in the traditional sense of the term. They don't believe in "the market" any more than the most committed Marxist. What they believe in above all else is protecting the power and privilege of big business.

This is of a piece with the design of the Medicare prescription drug plan, which rather than having the government provide a benefit and letting insurance companies compete on equal terms, provides massive subsidies to insurance companies to induce them to provide the benefit at a higher cost; or the student loan program, which rather than having the government make loans to students, provides massive subsidies to banks to induce them to lend to students at a higher cost; or the opposition to market-based solutions to global warming in favor of complex schemes of targeted subsidies that enrich the well-connected corporations that manage to receive them.

Before you libertarian / capital L Liberals / true conservatives jump to the conclusion that the answer is to elect a real conservative president (who, by the way? I don't see any of the Republican candidates making a principled case against excesses like those I described above), let me ask this: has there ever been a Republican presidential administration, Reagan included, that did not twist the rhetoric in favor of "markets" into support for big business? Think, for example, about the Savings and Loan debacle of the early to mid-1980s, in which the deregulators in Congress and the Reagan Administration pushed to remove restrictions on the types of loans S&Ls could make but did not make corresponding changes in the deposit insurance system. The result was massive speculation and irresponsible lending on the part of S&Ls with taxpayer-insured money. When regulators started raising warning flags, the Reagan Administration cut staffs of FSLIC and other agencies dramatically, making it impossible for the regulators to do their jobs. Of course Democrats in Congress were implicated too - when S&Ls did get into legal trouble, they could always call a senator to put pressure on the regulatory agencies to call off the dogs. The point is, when push came to shove the purpose of deregulation of the S&L industry was not to create a well-functioning home lending market, but to make it possible for big financial institutions (and small well-connected ones) to make a pile at taxpayers' expense.

My theory, which I think I've expressed before: true conservatism is untenable as a governing philosophy because markets are not an effective constituency. Under Republican leadership, policy will always be made to serve the voting and fundraising constituencies, big business and cultural conservative organizations.