"Therefore, at least some mild redistribution will be an incidental byproduct of a just and well-functioning government. Accepting these practical realities is very different from actual advocacy of redistribution as good in and of itself."

Obama told Goof-the-plumber that he wanted to spread the wealth a little more. That's not exactly placing your left hand on Das Kapital and swearing fealty to Comrade Lenin. If you want to talk redistribution, let's talk about the redistribution that's going on now: taking wealth from the local wage earner and small-business owner and redistributing it to the Chinese and the big money folks.

Why do you "low tax" Republicans think so many states have had such problems with property taxes? When you ship jobs overseas in order to increase profits, fatten portfolios and help pay for the Olympics you reduce wages. That means you reduce the amount of money people have to run their government and spend in their local economy. But the roads still have to be maintained, cops still need gas in their patrol cars and teachers need to be paid. And oh yeah, out here in the sticks we're talking one county deputy on the roads at night and a courthouse full of part-time employees who get a small stipend to run the local government so waste, fraud and abuse are not the issue. The issue is wages.

You see my fellow republicans, the laws of mathematics don't care if you're a liberal or conservative. They simply say that when wages stagnate, go down or vanish through outsourcing the tax-base shrinks and even the most well-functioning government will have to raise rates to offset the decrease in revenue plus the increase in the cost of doing business. That's exactly what's been happening across this country. Those who stood to make money off this fiasco did, and justified it by claiming that doing it any other way would be a violation of of the spirit of Adam Smith and an affront to the ghost of Ronald Reagan. The local wage earner and small business owner got hosed by these actions, then watched as Bush and the Republican congress gave huge tax breaks to the very people who got rich from outsourcing, then saw their local tax rates shoot up because outsourcing whithered the tax-base. That is why they voted for Obama.

Oh by the way, over the last several decades how many good, conservative, "small-government" parents had kids in public schools and were perfectly content with their local government tossing old people on fixed incomes out of their homes so that said parents would only have to pay a fraction of the cost of their kids' education? If you tax an old lady out of her house so your kid can have a superintendent who gets paid more than Obama will as president, how can you call that anything but redistribution of wealth?

For that matter, how many "conservative" school board members have driven up the local property tax rate by insisting that the school hire a $100k per year coach instead of finding a volunteer, then went back to complaining about the tax rate once their kid graduated and wasn't playing ball anymore?

I guess it's okay to redistribute wealth as long it's used to heat the gymn your kid plays games in on Friday and Saturday nights but it's not okay to improve the infrastructure, care for the sick and educate your kid when he's not shooting hoops.

Nice post. I consider myself a liberal AND a conservative. My view of conservatism has always been that it starts at home--with me. It's not an ideology so much as a life style.