“Man,” I cried, “how ignorant art thou in thy pride of wisdom!” – from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Translation: the most dangerous thing in the world is being a smart guy who isn't actually as smart as he thinks he is.

Why? Hey, this is Frankenstein we're talking about – because you might end up creating monsters that come back to haunt you later. Today's example? This quote from the Burlington Free Press:

Kurt Wright is the man on the spot. He is the Republican City Council president of one of the most un-Republican cities in the country.

It's old news, but in light of recent conversations about backing anti-choice, anti-gay rights Republican Senators as de facto Dem candidates, it bears repeating. Rep. Kurt Wright is playing savvy politics in positioning himself as a real threat – not simply in the Burlington mayor's race, but for statewide office through his position as leader of the Burlington City Council. For those of you who don't remember, the reason he has that position is that a Democrat put him there, rather than see a Progressive get the position. This is what's known as cutting off one's nose to spite one's face – or possibly shooting off one's face to spite one's head.

Wright is well on the way to becoming the latest Frankencrat Monster. Also on the list is General Michael Dubie, brother of the other Dubie, who was promoted to the position of Adjutant General by the Democratic legislature, and wasted no time in speaking out against progressive legislative priorities vis-a-vis the VT National Guard and Iraq.

Think I'm being alarmist? When we don't challenge these guys and instead enable them or give them free passes, they come back bigger and better, even when we thought we were being clever when we did it in the first place. In 2000, the Democrats did not field a candidate for State Treasurer, allowing the Republican incumbent to walk in with a gazillion percent of the vote and build up a phony bipartisan feelgood narrative that made him into an electoral juggernaut.

If you're new to the state, the Treasurer's name was Jim Douglas.

So now we have massive infrastructure failure at both ends of the Mississippi River.  I guess this is the moment when the conservative goal of dragging off the government and drowning it has been most successful.  The trouble is that both this tragedy and Hurricane Katrina demonstrate that government is not “them”- it is “us.”  And we are the ones being literally drowned.  And before we are all overwhelmed by red herring press discussions of gussets versus welded construction on bridges, let's remember this -road and bridge maintenance is about funding, and we all know where the funds are going.

Bush stood up in a news conference and spoke relaxedly about the sub-prime mortgage disaster rippling through world markets.  He said that the market would correct naturally and that we should all be happy that the economy is in such good shape, and that tax-and-spend Democrats would raise our taxes, undermine the entrepreneurial spirit and alter the spending habits of Americans who know better how to spend their money than does the government.

But infrastructure is not created by entrepreneurs and private investors.  Infrastructure is more than simply a large capital investment like a telephone company or an electrical generator.  Infrastructure generates social benefits that are beyond the financial returns to an investor.  And infrastructure has what economists call “positive network effects.”  In other words, the more of it there is, the more valuable it becomes.  An entrepreneur can build a toll road between two or three points, but unless it connects to all the other roads, it is of minimal value (“Bridge to Nowhere”).  No entrepreneur would build the interstate highway system.  And none would maintain it.

Government is the institution that societies create to handle things that we must do in common, and that will not be done well or at all by individuals acting in their own self-interest, no matter how enlightened.  And there are a lot of those.

I spoke with a soldier who told me he was offered 97,000 a month to join Blackwater as a private contracter in Iraq.   I've heard that there are now more private contracters than soldiers.