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Even Milton Friedman, the granddaddy of championing the "free market system" and the smallest possible government always said that the proper function of the government was to help and take care of the weak, the ill and the poor who cannot help themselves, in addition to such things as national defense and police.
So I do not understand where this strange ideological insistence is coming from for today's GOP ideologues, such as Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and now, apparently, even Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, who insist, so adamantly--as if it were their highest moral principle--that the government provides as little help as possible to the poor who cannot afford health insurance, or to the unemployed who need help while looking for a job--or the poor who need food stamps to put food on the table for their children.
A political party whose highest political agenda is cruelty to the poor and the needy has really no place in a democratic government or politics, since what stands behind such an agenda is not even a political ideology, in a proper sense of the word, so much as a sickness of the mind and the soul.
