A friend of a close relative just got himself hired on as a firefighter with a department right up the road. They gave him a really cool light bar for his truck, a pager, a bunch of gear and most importantly, a paycheck. And now they are paying him to advance his training and certificates with the local community college so he can increase his skills and make more money.
But before he was hired on as a public servant for which tax dollars pay his salary, his benefits that are far better than my own and the education/training he is going to receive as part of his job, he went to a community college financed through Pell grants because his mom has been laid-off from her GM job for years and has virtually no income. And before that, he attended thirteen years of public school supported by property tax dollars.
And he is a Republican, border-line Tea Party supporter. And he thinks this country is becoming too socialist. And he thinks we should all be individually responsible for ourselves, the government is too big and should butt out of our lives entirely. Moreover, he believes he has achieved everything he has and is by hard work and his own initiative.
I need to know what I am failing to understand.
Bravo @dogwalkblog –Cliff Notes to the Teabagger movement: I am he and we are him and we are too big to fail … http://ht.ly/1XPmd
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It’s just more lies told by those who tout the capitalist party line. That’s not a very sophisticated response, but it’s what comes to mind. The sad thing is that so few really understand the true game being played here.
One of the things that stuck in my mind when I flirted with philosophy for a while as a very young man was Socrates’ definition of justice, which he defined as protecting the weak from the powerful. The powerful man has no need of justice, Socrates said, because he makes his own.
Later, of course, we had Herbert Spencer with his “survival of the fittest,” which capitalists then took as a moral imperative to conduct their affairs in any way that suits them, which is really all that’s going on in this much vaunted “free marketplace.” I have never quite understood the “freedom” involved in replacing a “government bureaucrat” with a monopoly, but people tend not to delve too deeply into that sort of thing.
Really, the free world they wish to provide for us existed for most of the nineteenth century and on into the early decades of the twentieth. The Robber Baron era. And eventually, because who can be against freedom, we will be back to that. Personally, I am quite glad that I am 65, not 25, because the prospect before us is bleak indeed.
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@joseph There is a lot of confusion that equates capitalism with democracy, or what Conservatives are now trying to relabel as Free Market. I suppose as long as you can work “free” into something, it is democratic and good. Our economy has migrated from the costly manufacturing model to one only of transactions, where profit is derived from moving money. And the money isn’t even physical money, just numbers in a bank account somewhere. With “too big to fail” and defining corporations as people with First Amendment rights, we no longer have to be wary of the government taking over our lives. We should be worrying about the larger corporations. As of now, the only “Death Panels” that exist are medical review boards on staff with major insurance companies whose profit motives favor the sick patient dying quickly. That one fact alone should scare Conservatives into reason, but it doesn’t as most feel they are immune to decisions reserved only for the riff-raff. If you are deprived of money in America, you are riff-raff, regardless of how much you had contributed in the past.
This comment was originally posted on DogWalkBlog