Response to Stewart Gardner - what are Republicans up to?

I keep coming back to the basic problem – they are not intellectually honest.  The basic premises that: (1) markets work by themselves; and (2) making the rich richer benefits everyone have each been convincingly refuted (if they weren't already).  Republicans' nihilistic view that government is bad for, and bad at, all things other than defense is not only unsupported by anything but ideology, but manifestly irrelevant in light of the private sector failures, since large swaths of the private sector are now substantially dependent on the government.  In fact, trashing the very government Republicans are asking to run (which the entire Reagan era Republican doctrine has been based on), has proven disastrously corrosive to the functioning of our agencies, and now our entire society - it's no better than trashing business, but it's much more commonplace and virulent.  And the view that fiscal stimulus/government spending is always (ipso facto) a bad thing is contrary to history.  So they are left with a bunch of ranting, using bogeyman words like “socialism” and “government waste” promoted by deeply irresponsible people.   There is little analysis other than pre-Depression classical economics - nor any prescription that I have heard that will do anything but exacerbate problems for people without jobs or health insurance and further threaten the social consensus of post-war America.  And, despite the nostalgia - it’s not the early 80’s anymore - the simple removal of regulation and lowering of taxes is no longer an option (not that those prescriptions really worked or were even followed - what worked was Paul Volcker).  The Republican thinking has become nothing other than rooting for a bad result from Democratic policies; that is sick – really, diseased – thinking, as is the politics that naturally flows from it.