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" I&amp;#039;ve reserved comment on the upcoming tussle over the &amp;quot;sequester&amp;quot; for a couple of reasons. The first is that I&amp;#039;m tired of repeating, over and over again, that the creation of an architecture of jerry-rigged mechanisms to replace the orderly budget process \u2014 SuperCommittee! Simpson-Bowles! Sequester Me, Baby, Like My Back Ain&amp;#039;t Got No Bone! \u2014 was bound to collapse of its own silly weight eventually. (Newt Gingrich and I agreed that the late, unlamented SuperCommittee was a bad idea.) That this rickety structure was constructed at all is an ironic testimony to the ability of congressional Republicans to tear things down if they don&amp;#039;t get their way, come hell or presidential elections. The second was that I didn&amp;#039;t think there was any way they&amp;#039;d go through with it. Sooner or later, I figured, the corporate class behind both political parties \u2014 but most enthusiastically behind the Republicans \u2014 would tell everybody to knock off this silly crapola and get back to doing America&amp;#039;s business, which is business. This, I will grant you, was based somewhat on the naive expectation that there was some vestigial patriotism left in that corporate class, and that it had not given itself over wholly to the pursuit of every last nickel that rolled under the sofa. Every couple of weeks, I have to fly somewhere to do some work. Every couple of weeks, I have to submit myself to the tender mercies of the American airline industry. (I also have to submit myself to the tender mercies of the TSA, which is an entirely different grope up the inseam of life.) This allows me a close-up view of my fellow humans who work in other businesses and, boy howdy, are there a lot of them. I see America working, with its binders open, its spreadsheets spread, its laptops humming, all of which are balanced on those little folding tables along with a tiny bag of pretzels and the fourth bottle of Chardonnay of the morning. Business travel in this country is a $246 billion industry all on its own, which is not even to factor in the business that gets done once you get there. Presumably, the people who run these businesses have a more than vested interest in making sure all the drones get from one place to another so that the business of those businesses get done.  According to the proposed sequester, the FAA is going to face approximately $1 billion in cuts. This could mean a couple of thousand air-traffic controllers could be laid off. Anybody who doesn&amp;#039;t think this will materially affect the way all these people \u2014 like, say, me \u2014 get their business done hasn&amp;#039;t flown any time in the past 20 years, and is more than welcome to spend eight days in a Chipotle while trying to get from Charlotte to Tucson. There was, I thought, absolutely no way that the people who own both large corporations and the politicians that serve them would allow something like this to happen. Sure, I reasoned, those folks could live very well without, say, the FDA or OSHA. (The rest of us couldn&amp;#039;t, but that&amp;#039;s the way it goes.) But they couldn&amp;#039;t live with things like air travel grinding to a halt. However, as the government has lurched toward the March 1 deadline, it became clear that I had misapprehended what was really going on. For almost 40 years, both deliberately and by accident, the conservative movement had run against their fanciful notions of what a command economy was, but against the notion of a mixed economy at all. They fashioned a philosophy in which private money and public money were best left apart from each other. They created a view of the how the country operates that was laissez faire in ridiculous extreme. They have convinced themselves that any mixing of public and private money is invariably destructive to the latter to the benefit of the former. (That this rarely in their minds applied to military spending is beside the point for the moment, and will continue to be, because I still believe that there is absolutely no way the defense-related sequester cuts happen.) What you are seeing now is the blank wall at the end of the ideological blind alley down which the conservative movement has frolicked since the day Ronald Reagan told us that government really was the problem. Without the involvement of government, the planes don&amp;#039;t fly. Or, at best, they fly into each other, which is bad for business. Without the involvement of government, the trucks have no highways on which to roll. Break faith in the covenant of a mixed economy and you wind up with no economy at all. If the corporate class in this country still took pride in, you know, making stuff, instead of banking profits by shuffling paper around on Wall Street, it would crack the whip in 10 minutes on this foolishness. Alas, even that check-and-balance exercise is gone now. I really thought that mutual self-interest would win the day. Silly me. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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