Now that the Good Ship Rudy is sinking under the weight of public rejection, NRO’s David Frum has decided that he’s not that keen on letting the little people have an opinion on how they will rule themselves:
Since the 1960s, conservatives have chafed and seethed against liberal elitism. Liberals have used their influence in the courts and government bureaucracies to win political victories they never could have won at the ballot box. Conservatives have reacted by turning to populism — to a defence of the commonsense wisdom of ordinary voters against the pretensions of know-it-alls.
Conservatives have drawn strength from populism. But you can overdo any good thing –and I am beginning to think that on this one, we’ve zoomed the car into the red zone….
The currently front-running candidate in Iowa, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, has built his campaign on a plan to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax. Economists and tax experts virtually unanimously agree that the plan is beyond unworkable — that it is downright absurd.
Right, a failure to substitute faux conservative elitism for liberal elitism, THAT’S the problem. And how can it possibly to be “downright absurd” to eliminate an onerous, unjust and evil tax that didn’t exist for the majority of the country’s history. And Frum reveals himself to be either a deeply dishonest man or a shockingly ignorant one when he tells obvious untruths about Ron Paul:
Huckabee and Paul have not the faintest idea of what they are talking about. The problem is not that their answers are wrong — that can happen to anyone. The problem is that they don’t understand the questions, and are too lazy or too arrogant to learn.
I have emailed Mr. Frum at asking him to either retract his erroneous charges about Ron Paul or to debate me concerning the economic realities of the federal income tax and Ron Paul’s proven knowledge of them.
UPDATE: I have since written a detailed response to what passed for Mr. Frum’s defense of his erroneous assertion.