Republicans insist that making businesses happy with low taxes, low fees and no regulations will magically produce jobs in and of itself makes no sense. If, because of all the cuts in state and federal revenues that they’re also insisting on, ordinary people have no money with which to buy products, businesses will just sit on their cash and wait for buyers to show up before adding jobs or services. It’s what they’ve been doing for some time now.

Unfortunately, this kind of thinking seems to be a western world phenomenon these days with dire consequences for everyone. Europe isn’t talking about stimulus spending or raising revenues either but insisting on the kinds of budget cuts that are losing jobs and creating hardship for their peoples. David Cameron in Britain seems to have succumbed to the Conservative disease so prevalent here, and look what has happened there. The London riots were not just kids on the rampage for the fun of it, or the criminal behavior of a bunch of thugs, though elements of both were involved. Cameron refuses to acknowledge that anything his government has done might have something to do with the terrible destruction we’ve seen. He even wants to throw the convicted rioters and their families out of the only shelter they have. Is he going to build debtors prisons to put them in as well, so they can labor for the State for free (slavery)?

Governments and Conservatives in the West seem to have lost their minds. But as today’s New York Times editorial puts it:

The Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable want tax cuts too. But how exactly do these executives imagine this spending would be paid for, if not through higher taxes? Or do they really want the elderly and low-income families to give up some of their safety-net benefits to widen interstate highways, while high-income money managers sacrifice nothing?

Are business leaders, too, afraid of the Tea Party-type extremists as are many of our Republican moderates? Or are they all infected by the magical thinking that denies history, evolution, global warming, and the basic economics of government. What next?