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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Time to End the Free Lunch at Last

The free market mantras of Movement Conservatism have really hit rock bottom in the libertopian paradises of catastrophic pre-emptive war, occupation, and post-Katrina "reconstruction."

It's hard to imagine the dead-eyed greedheads have not fatally overreached at last.

Yachts for billionaires or public schools for all? This simply isn't an argument they can win.

It's over. It has to be over.

This is the turning of the tide of the revolting "tax revolt" that looted government to the brink of collapse and then blamed the resulting ruins for failing to continue to provide shelter as they used to do.

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch, as the libertopians used to say (as they picked our pockets for lunch money).

Taxes are a price we pay for civilization.

Fail to pay?

Crumbling institutions, crumbling infrastructure, crumbling standard of living, crumbling standards in general, crumbling alternatives for the nonviolent resolution of disputes, crumbling hopes.

Had enough? Then stop stealing from the vulnerable, stop stealing from the future, stop stealing your lunch money. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

4 comments:

Robin said...

See, I just don't see this alleged pessimism you're supposed to be peddling around here.

"It has to be over" is the most optimistic thing you could say about libertopia, especially in the face of the Ron Paul successes in this election. Granted, his numbers are pathetic overall, but the fact that the raw number of individuals lauding his ridiculous views is as high as it is makes me think not only is it not over, but it's getting significantly worse all the time.

Time for some more YouTube, I guess!

Dale Carrico said...

I lived through my own Perils with the Paulites moment here for a while a few months back, and you're right... they seriously bring some relentless idiot fervor to the table -- but I've tidily repressed the trauma of that whole episode, so everything's fine. They put the convict in conviction (if I may channel for a moment my inner cheerleader).

You know, on a related and somewhat hopeful note, I honestly don't think the Randroids and libertopian types quite realize yet just how deep the stink of the Bush years has sunk into the general perception of their catastrophically infantile little movement and viewpoint.

Their abstractions never actually touch ground (creativity isn't individualist in the way they think it is, reasonableness isn't maximizing in the way they think it is, profitability isn't optimizing in the way they think it is, legitimacy is not stultifying in the way they think it is, and not one of them is superior in the way they tend to think they are, they're just spoiled) and they fail to grasp that their rhetoric will be judged then by the results eventuating from its real world application by crony capitalists in the republican party rather than by, say, the plots of science fiction novels in which reality conforms as stubbornly and completely unrealistically to their models and expectations as they do themselves.

It is becoming a commonplace to say -- as only a small coterie of leftists have been saying for thirty years always to be shouted down by braying know-nothings eager to make a buck whatever the consequences -- that the problem is governance by people who don't believe in the possibility of governing democratically and well, not a problem inhering in the very idea of government. That shift is enormously wholesome. It's too late for the turning of the tide to reposition the US for global hegemony (another good thing), but it isn't too late to save us from the complete pointless self-immolation the corporate-militarists have been cheerleading us through. (Did you like how I brought it back to the cheerleader at the end? Artistry, pure artistry, I tells ya.)

Anonymous said...

Some of the Ron Paul thing is due to the fact that, apart from Kucinich, he's the only candidate in either party with a convincing anti-war stance. Take that away and I'd say about half his support goes with it. It is saddening that the response of so many people to the disasters of the last 6 years or so is to dig deeper into the silly mythologies that have animated this country for hundreds of years; the self-made man, government as evil and business as the only source of innovation, taxes as theft, the IRS as practically a new NKVD, any regulation of industry as tantamount to communism, blah-blah, Ayn Rand, blah... That's the problem with crisis, it pushes the people back into fundamentalist versions of their basic beliefs. And when your basic beliefs are as fucked up as those of most Americans, well this is what you get. Six millions dollars in one day for a crazy old racist who wants to take the US out of the UN and abolish the EPA, Medicare and Social Security.

Now that the religious right is finally dying I actually expect more libertarian craziness. There seems to be a kind of Law of Conservation of Lunacy here in the US. Crackpots can be neither created nor destroyed, they can only change the particular form of the nuttiness they embrace. This country is still a nation of petulant 14 olds at heart. It's just one stupid tantrum after another, no real attempt to understand reality or deal with it. The slogan on the money shouldn't be "in God we Trust" but just "GIMME!!!".

Dale Carrico said...

There seems to be a kind of Law of Conservation of Lunacy here in the US.

Good news for the Robot Cultists in the house, I suspect.