When Mitch Daniels, the Republican governor of Indiana, proposed a GOP “truce” on social issues it was clear that a) he was interested in running for the party’s presidential nomination and b) that his moderate views on said social issues would most probably be a significant handicap.
Lo and behold, South Carolina’s Jim DeMint – sometimes seen as the senior Tea Party figure in the Senate and a potential 2012 candidate himself – pipes up to claim you “can’t be a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative.”
This would be news to Milton Friedman, among others. (Though you can argue the extent to which Friedman, like Hayek, was actually a conservative.) Demint, however, is of the view that God and Government are locked in some eternal tussle for supremacy and the larger government becomes the smaller God must be and vice versa.
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