In the Guardian, Greg Anrig has a comprehensive look at rightist ideology and how its been neither efficient nor effective in practice. In a recent speech, former business consultant and current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney sang from the conservative movement's hymnal when he intoned: "Compared to free markets and free enterprises, government is slow to act, wasteful, duplicative, bureaucratic, inefficient, ineffective and unresponsive." That same mindset under the Bush administration impelled a massive increase in reliance on private contractors to provide goods and services that previously the government had been more directly responsible for producing and overseeing. The upshot has been far more egregious and pervasive wastefulness of taxpayer dollars than anything documented in the past. The state department's contracting failures closely resemble those uncovered last month by the government accountability office (GAO) in its investigation of the department of homeland security's (DHS) outsourcing. The GAO, which scrutinized 117 DHS contracts, found that "the level of oversight provided did not always ensure accountability for decisions or the ability to judge whether the contractor was performing as required." Other studies have documented egregious wastefulness connected to post-Katrina government contracts with private providers, as well as the defence department's outsourcing to companies like Bechtel, Fluor, Parsons and the Halliburton subsidiary KBR. As the problems with contracting get worse, the right's rhetoric on government gets even more supportive of contracting and the market and less supportive of government. The contradicting evidence provided by Blackwater and all the other contracting mishaps that Anrig documents is merely a test of the faithful, a way of sorting out the true believers from the casually observant. And Romney's quote shows that the true believers have increasing control over the Republican Party.