Tirade alert. I won't be watching much of the Boston convention tonight. I saw enough Hillary Clinton already today, coming to me from the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal.

Her topic was outsourcing -- a beautiful piece of vine-ripened fruit for a politican (because economic displacement means change, and the prospect of change instills fear, and politicians prey upon people's fears).

Anyway, her discussion of outsourcing started reasonably. She essentially pointed out that companies don't realize as much cost savings as they assume when they move operations offshore. Fair enough -- I suspect that's true in many instances.

But being a leftist politician, Hillary would never be satisfied to let the operation of the market sort these things out. No, according to her, the government needs to spend money. Invest in technology. Build broadband Internet into rural areas. Forge government partnerships with business.

Hold the phone: the federal government is going to identify promising technologies and business enterprises and skillfully invest my money (and yours) in them?

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

I'm conservative, so I get riled up when I read this stuff. But what's so conservative about my reaction? Think about how ass-backward the dominant naming convention is. Exactly how does a person like me get the label "conservative"? I'm for liberalized trade, open markets, consumer choice, and government accountability. What part of the old guard am I trying to conserve?
Likewise, how do modern-day Democrats get to be called "liberal"? They staunchly defend all government programs -- even those that have demonstrably failed. They want government to control markets and restrict consumer choice. They fear change and don't trust people to figure out how to manage change in their own lives.

Even in the culture wars the so-called conservatives have the liberal high ground -- the modern left most often makes its advances through unelected, unaccountable, unrepentant judges. It's one thing to change the marriage statutes via normal legislative process; it's quite another to ram it through by court order. Or take abortion, the Mother of All Political Battles: the most ardent anti-abortion "conservative" jurists do not generally argue that the Constitution prohibits abortion (which would be the converse of the prevailing leftist argument that the Constitution guarantees its legality). Yeah, I heard Hadley Arkes make that case in a lecture to the Federalist Society, but I'm not sure even he took it seriously.

Anyway, even if the government could wave a magic wand and re-make the economy to be as it was some 30 or 40 years ago, would that be a good idea? No such magic wand exists, so the attempt itself would create tremendous harm -- even more important than the law of unintended consequences, there is the Single Iron Rule: government can't do anything efficiently. For cryin' out loud, the government can't even cleanly execute the tasks which are properly in its own domain! Disaffected voters who want the feds to protect them from the ravages of a changing world economy would do well to remember that the feds couldn't even protect its own Pentagon from wackos with box-cutters.

And those who teeter on the edge of true liberalism would do well to recall that one of the four hijacked planes was indeed taken down, not by government agencies (see Single Iron Rule above), but by everyday Americans who are smart, connected, resourceful, and ready to act boldly even in the face of an unprecedented challenge.

Rely on government to sort it out? Fine: for running the military and for coining currency and other Article I responsibilities (c'mon Souter, c'mon Stevens: read the friggin' document), leave those things in the federal domain. But for everyting else, let's rely on our wits. We'll save a bundle and the outcome will be better.

Now get off the stage Hillary -- you've taken enough out of my paycheck already.