Which Way Are We Going?
Let me see if I have this straight. A number of people in conservative circles are suggesting privatizing retirement savings and doing away with social security, and similarly getting rid of Medicare and other public health care initiatives. They wish to lower taxes for the wealthy, already at historic lows; deregulate businesses and finance; do away with the minimum wage and unemployment insurance; and to fight against unions while leaving the door open to shipping jobs to poor countries with few if any labor laws. All in the name of liberty and freedom and the individual.
They wish to do away with the public version of social security, leaving only private retirement plans which could leave millions broken when the markets tumble (as they have a tendency to do), with the sentiment of “tough for them.”
They wish to do away with Medicare, and health care in general, and leave the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to do and charge whatever they wish, leaving tens of millions either uninsured or just as bad while paying for it. Caveat emptor and all that.
They wish to lower tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations, already capable of evading the nominal tax rates, to levels well below the historical average, even doing away with some taxes altogether, and erase most regulations that keep these people from being excessively predatory on the poor and the weak. Because a person with wealth always gains more wealth by the sweat of his brow, not by taking advantage of others before whom he can dangle the carrot and always get more than he gives. No, their money is always earned fair and square, with no help from anyone else, and asking for them to give back to the society they earned it in is, well, socialist and evil.
They wish to discourage or otherwise break up unions, discard the minimum wage, and do away with unemployment insurance. Because if your job went overseas to someone who will work for a dollar a day and your family is starving, then it’s your own damn fault for being so stupid for not being a successful, self-made businessman, and you should expect to receive no handouts and no help.
These are all pretty much the policy ideas coming from various areas of the right wing these days, especially from Tea Party candidates and groups.
Maybe it’s just me, but that sounds like a horrific world they wish to create. Might as well just take the next step at the same time and strike child labor laws, set up debtors’ prisons, and maybe even officially bring back indentured servitude and the road that leads to. After all, if you can’t make your way, what right do you have for any favors from the government?
“All in the name of liberty and freedom and the individual.”
…or, if I may, “all in the name of ideology.”
And as a friend of mine once said of religion, “ideology is what we fall back on when we get tired of thinking.” Fortunately our society is based upon hundreds of years of pragmatism. Ideology is for idiots. (you can quote me on that).
I saw a play write interviewed on the Charlie Rose show way back in the latter of half of the 1990s. I bit sketchy in my mind now, but as I recall, the play he was being interviewed for was about a black person volunteering themselves back into slavery in modern times: essentially a modestly wealthy, rather friendly couple wander into the shop she is working in, she realizes that they are kind, decent people, and to afford herself protection from an increasingly harsh society, she voluntarily offered to enter herself into slavery. Great idea for a play.
If we are in danger of falling into serfdom, why not pick out your owners before they are picked for you.
It’s not much different today. If you have cancer but no insurance, then find a nice white collar crime, commit it, be sentenced to a minimum security jail, and get some health care paid for by state. The downside of jail is sodomy, but maybe that can be mitigated by learning some marshal arts and going to a minimum security prison.
Great idea for a play.</i<
This is a good read of a possible future:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Anyhoo, one needs to just analyze the present Republican party coalition.
You got the superpluto element, can’t really call them plutocrats for what they want is to be just left alone with their billions in investments and their business operations.
When you have a billion dollars you are your own state to a great extent.
Since the 1970s this superpluto element has been building the intellectual framework of the right — The Heritage Foundation, the Mellon-Scaife stuff, Olin, Koch, Hoover Institute, Cato, Reason, etc etc.
Then there’s the upper middle class Kapos willing to serve the superpluto system. Judge Bork, Justice Roberts, the general Republican “K Street” lobbyist mafia.
This ties into the military-industrial sector, which is basically a Republican shop at this point. We are spending $3000 per capita per year on defense, $8/day, which is actually enough to live on in the US if one is very frugal.
And of course the military is infiltrated by the religious right, they form the electoral base of the Republican party in their millions. Anti-abortion, Anti-Gay, Anti-Islam/Catholic/Mormon/Atheist, anti-“Darwinism” this is just a pitifully deluded and backward group of people. But make no mistake, they have the power of numbers — 40% of the population says they attend church once a week and they are the Republican’s strongest deme, along with billionaires, orthodox Jews, and Walmart shoppers. Evangelicals broke 79% for Bush in 2004 and 73% for McCain in 2008.
Whites make up the bulk of evangelical Christianity and they are also the bulk of the Tea Party and of the revisionist right.
Government has been seen to overly invasive in pushing back the historical white privilege to such an extent that whites see government as something for historical minorities, not themselves. When in online discussions I think it’s a useful device to shift to “our government” instead of “the government”, but Republicans think of the FDR/Eisenhower/LBJ/Obama social justice as something catering to if not empowering people who are not them.
Now, having said all that, I think it is important to understand that Government has gotten pretty damn big over time.
Total government spending, NOT including social security, is going to be $6.0T in 2011, $52,000 PER HOUSEHOLD.
That is one median government job in every pot! How is this even possible???
The right has a narrative that it is government choking the economy. That if deregulate, disband and let all of our inner Reagans free we can re-create the greatness that was the White Protestant America of the early 20th century.
It is an attractive narrative to many people.
The thing that surprises me is the sheer openness of it. This is not something that has to be divined from rumors or inferred from indirect action. These are direct policy proposals from the candidates’ own mouths. They are almost literally saying that rich people should be given pretty much every freedom to do what they want and protections and support for the poor be removed. Few or no controls on the powerful, few or no safety nets for the disadvantaged. I mean, Jesus.
Like I said above, having the social conservative’s votes locked up helps — if my mom was faced with two candidates that would a) eliminate her Medicaid or b) make abortion more available she’d pick the former, since among other things Christians have an inbuilt martyrdom complex.
All this is based on polling — We are a nation of idiots.
But I think I’ve said that before
Also, it’s very easy to “run against Washington”. The Republicans have been doing this for 150+ years.
Since the 1970s they have the mythology that cutting taxes on the wealthy will cripple the social security state and get all the lazy people back to work, making the tax cuts pay for themselves.
Everbody’s for cutting somebody else’s handout — you won’t see Palin campaigning against Alaska’s federal handouts, she was proud to have spent that money after all, and you won’t see farm states railing against the $20B+ of ag subsidies.
And of course nobody dares speak against the $900B/yr defense budget. That’s one helluva jobs program, notionally TEN MILLION well-paying jobs at ~$90K/yr.
We can be thankful that the US people have a reasonable choice at the ballot box this cycle. This is a very simply exercise in democracy.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken