Yesterday, we examined how Mark Dayton would endeavor to move Minnesota backward – to try to go Back to the Seventies for its economic model.

And that’s if everything goes perfectly – which it can not.

But it’s so much worse than that.

Mark Dayton, and the Democratic Farmer/Labor Party, wants Minnesota to not only look backwards forty years for its model – but they want Minnesota to look at the sidewalk in front of its feet as it shuffles forward into history.

The DFL in Minnesota – and the state’s once-very-liberal Republican party – have a vision of government that, to take the Dayton campaign at its word, has three messages:

3. Attack the most convenient scapegoats. During tough economic times, “the rich” are a convenient set of scapegoats.

2. Focus on short-term outcomes: The old saying goes “Give a man a fish, he eats for a day; show a man how to fish, he eats forever”.  Mark Dayton’s campaign is all about creating a large, elaborate, unionized and exquisitely expensive infrastructure to hand out fish in all its metaphorical forms, while making the art of fishing that much harder for them to master.

1. Above all, keep government fat and happy. Mark Dayton’s axiom for Minnesota, if you take  his campaign at face value, is this; satisfying the wants of Minnesota’s professional and vocational Governing Class is the supreme mission of government.

And history shows us that a state – in the general or United sense – that focuses on these priorities can not survive, much less thrive.

At the very least, these priorities pound society into a master-servant relationship – with government as the master.  A benevolent master, mostly, doling out little bits of satisfaction – fish, if you will – to keep the peasants mollified, but a master nonetheless.

Like a cattledriver and his cattle.

Are you happy to moo for a better Minnesota?

Minnesota deserves better.

Because in its truest form, America is about better.  America in its truest form is not a bunch of serfs serving its lords and masters.  It is a free association of equals, governing itself by consent of the governed, with a government that takes care of its appointed roles and otherwise gets the hell out of the way.

Mark Dayton, at his very best, is a throwback to an era that not only can not come back – it must not come back.

So tomorrow, Minnesota, let us deserve better.

Previous Reasons Dayton Should Not Be Governor

• #2: Moving Minnesota Backward
• #3: Unexamined
• #4: Fool Us Three Times
• #5: We Are Better Than This