Today's Must-Read from the Wall Street Journal

Today's must-read is an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by economist Alan Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. He isn't the first to dispute and disprove the Big Lie that's dominating the public conversation and shaping our national policy right now: the bogus idea that austerity creates jobs.

We've gotten to a dangerous point in our history. Our policies appear to be driven from the minority side and entirely based upon an unproven, actually a widely disproven, belief system.

The so called "genius" of unregulated markets and low taxes caused the mess we are in, so the Republicans and their massively wealthy sponsors are pushing public opinion toward doubling the bets on the bad policy. Voodoo Economics remains the Republican policy. Or call it religion.

As proved true with Iraq, Republicans don't care if something is true. They think they can make it true. In the words of the Bush White House "We create our own reality." And maybe they can make good things come true for a narrow group of very wealthy Americans.

What is happening is exactly what they said they wanted to happen. They want to kill government, our representative government. They want to kill democracy. They want to be rid of a government that can and will protect the public from pollution and poisonous products and fraud and financial collapse. These things don't bother them. Often they profit from them.

Are they willing to kill the government that builds roads and bridges and educates our children? Apparently yes. They look to a different future. They are taking their tax cuts and investing them in China and Indonesia and India, not here. They are guessing that poorly educated Americans will be more eager to do as they're told, and will work for much less. That is the Republican future.

It's a bold plan, but it isn't what anyone voted for. The only logical reason to shrink government spending at a time when business is flat is to depress the economy to make Obama unpopular and get a Republican president in 2012. So killing jobs is a good thing, for them. A flat economy is a good thing, for them. The Republican client list is holding trillions and is happy to wait another year and a half for the economy to get better.