{"id":8677,"date":"2011-02-14T21:52:35","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T02:52:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=8677"},"modified":"2011-02-15T09:12:40","modified_gmt":"2011-02-15T14:12:40","slug":"fiscal-conservatism-in-one-paragraph","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/8677\/fiscal-conservatism-in-one-paragraph\/","title":{"rendered":"Fiscal Conservatism, in One Paragraph"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There were many fine speeches from last week&#8217;s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that deserved the attention of thoughtful conservatives. First among equals, however, was the address that Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels gave for Friday night&#8217;s Ronald Reagan Centennial Dinner.<\/p>\n<p>The speech &#8212; written by Daniels himself &#8212; shows that the potential 2012 presidential candidate is not only a brilliant manager and a canny politician, but also an extremely sophisticated (and subtle) writer. In its defense of a prudent conservatism, the speech demonstrated that Daniels, not Barack Obama, is the great literary talent of 21st century politics. For unlike The One, Daniels speech was drenched in substance.<\/p>\n<p>As such, the speech deserves no less than to be read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.realclearpolitics.com\/articles\/2011\/02\/12\/debt_is_the_new_red_menace_108875.html\" target=\"_blank\">in its entirety<\/a>. Failing that, however, no passage deserves isolated quotation as much as Daniels&#8217; definition and defense of fiscal conservatism, a masterpiece of dictional economy:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer. When we do find it necessary, we feel a profound duty to use that dollar as carefully and effectively as possible, else we should never have taken it at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That&#8217;ll do, Mitch. That&#8217;ll do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There were many fine speeches from last week&#8217;s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that deserved the attention of thoughtful conservatives. First among equals, however, was the address that Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels gave for Friday night&#8217;s Ronald Reagan Centennial Dinner. The speech &#8212; written by Daniels himself &#8212; shows that the potential 2012 presidential candidate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2398,2397,872,81,1416,1697,781,913,456,61],"class_list":["post-8677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-2012-presidential-campaign","tag-conservative-political-action-conference","tag-cpac","tag-debt","tag-deficits","tag-fiscal-conservatism","tag-indiana","tag-mitch-daniels","tag-ronald-reagan","tag-spending"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8677"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8679,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8677\/revisions\/8679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}