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| Or you could just label them, left to right, Democrat and Republican or Labour and Conservative. (Wiki Commons photo) |
This unadulterated load of crass claptrap from America's young Ayn Rand wannabes popped up on my Facebook wall recently.
It is made up of ludicrous half-truths and untruths designed to appeal to a population frightened of its own shadow. Why is it so frightened? Somewhere, deep down, it knows that since electing Reagan, it has been on a downward spiral only temporarily broken by Clinton and Obama.
If a population wants to stop being frightened and halt the downward spiral for good, they have to elect several subsequent intelligent, tough, compassionate presidents. Republicanism, as practiced since Reagan, is a disease. To cure a disease, one must apply the right medicine, and one must keep taking that medicine until the problem has disappeared. The Reaganite Idiocy Syndrome is insidious; it will take several applications of democratic and possibly Democratic decency and common-sense medicine to eradicate.
It will be deadly, quite literally, to elect a Republican after only 8 years of the healing potion; Mr. Obama's applications of common sense and health care reform, for example, are still only starting to beat back the entrenched germs of greed.
First, however, one must dismantle the meme constellation constantly offered by those few who benefit from citizen fear (the rich) and those who are too ignorant to know what they do (the young conservatives.)
To refute the ludicrous points above one by one:
1. You can, in fact, legislate the poor into prosperity. It has been done time and again. Setting the slaves free "legislated" them into the ranks of those paid for work; it was then up to them to turn the possibility into prosperity.
If there is no possibility, then prosperity is not possible. When one percent of the population owns more than 90 percent of the wealth, the small amount leaked out to be shared amongst so many cannot, because it is spread too thinly, allow any one of the other 99 percent to create wealth; there is simply too little in the pot to share.
Decent tax legislation makes prosperity possible; current tax legislation makes it impossible. Simple as that.
2. This moronic statement would suggest that because I have a nice winter coat, you can't have one. It is the falsehood of inherent scarcity writ large.
I pay taxes. I have worked for that money. But guess what? I received value for that money. I received protection from attack by foreign nations; I received education (and lo and behold, the teachers ALSO received, in the form of paychecks so this is a particularly fair exchange), and; people down on their luck or ill received money to continue living which has at least two benefits for me.
First, I have been able to provide for the less fortunate (and remind me, aren't these Conservatives usually claimants to Christian heritage?) without even having to bear the difficult task of interacting directly with people under stress.
Second, I have been able to ensure that, if it is possible and they regain their health or overcome whatever problem has led them to receiving benefits, those people will be able to contribute to society again. And if not, then I have done what the Jews call a mitzvah, a generous and kind act with no expectation of return--something almost every religion on earth says we should do one of daily without exception, though they might call it by another name.
3. About this government giving and taking idea; what a crock. The government administers the communal wealth of the nation, the wealth that we, through our legislation, have determined should be used in one way or another. They are not TAKING it from us: They are using what we have decided via laws our representatives made for the purposes we, via law, have approved. Let me know, will you, next time an armed human arrives at your door, carts off your big-screen TV and gives it to a homeless person living on the streets. I am not expecting your call.
However, that applies when we have chosen legislators who work according to voter bidding, not according to what the Koch Brothers and any number of greed-based corporations desire.
As a result, we have allowed too many legislators, mainly conservative/Republican, to shift enormous amounts of our money to those who don't need it and cannot benefit from it (for example, the Koch Brothers and Donald Trump, who took government funds to build structures about which he later went bankrupt, thereby doubling his fraud),in lieu helping those who do need it so they can rejoin productive society.
4. This is my favorite because it is so wrong on so many levels.
You can, in fact, multiply wealth by dividing it. When a very few people have more money than they need to spend on necessities and luxuries, they hoard it, thus taking it out of circulation, which means it will not create a demand for more things.
When many people have it, most of them will spend most or all of it for their needs and for luxuries, thus ensuring even more things will need to be created. The meme above assumes a static "pie" of stuff, which is a priori erroneous. In an expanding universe, virtually eveyr part will expand unless stopped by the application of an opposing force. Even then, eventually it will break through and expand again.
Aside from that, this is a manifesto for slavery, nothing more, nothing less. Please understand that this is precisely what the Koch brothers want, slaves to do their bidding and increase their wealth--and hidden power--far beyond its current obscene size.
5. This one actually destroys itself. It is the result of believing numbers 1-4. Believing this and acting upon it, rather than taking back power--recalling legislators who are NOT using our money as we would like, to help the common people and not the uncommon scoundrels at the top--is the only thing that can make it true.
Here's the really bad news: So many people already believe that the falsehoods expressed by 1-4 are true that we are already well into the failure of society. Well into it. But the way out of it is NOT to believe in 1-4--that's what got us here in the first place. Reagan-Bush-Shrub made sure of it.
Taking the cure to stop the ethics-challenged, greed-ridden, compassion-negative Republicans and Conservatives from misusing our money is essential. It is the only thing we can do that will reverse our downward spiral. The only thing.
Mr. Obama went a long way toward reversing it, but he had only two terms, hallmarked by Republican obstruction. To resurrect America from the five terms, between them, of Reagan-Bush-Shrub, not to mention the skids under society engineered by uber-criminal Richard Nixon will take more than a pound of cure. It will take boatloads.
Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Shrub are all criminals, not Occupy, not Mr. Obama. Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Shrub stole from the poor to give to the rich, and while they were at it, planted the spores of the diseases of greed, cruelty, ignorance and self-centeredness in the American population.
It is time to cure the disease, toss out the infection of conservatism and steal from the rich to give to the poor, like Robin Hood. Except we won't be stealing it; it was ours to begin with.
PS It might interest these obviously ill-educated Young Conservatives to know that their hero, Ayn Rand, accepted Social Security and Medicare, programs she railed against and which her halfwit followers now want to curtail. Please note: She was so full of hubris that, despite relying on the largesse of the rest of us via Social Security and Medicare, she never recanted her hatred of those programs. Rand was a nicotine addict who had lung cancer and whose cockamamie ideas never made her enough money to retire without Social Security, thereby disproving her own theories.
Copyright 2016 Laura Harrison McBride
