#385 Bleating Heart Conservatives

#385 Bleating Heart Conservatives

They want to turn you into a farm animal, and that's the entirety of what's behind their bleating and whining about small government, low taxes, and freedom, freedom, freedom. The arch-conservative right wingnuts want you to spend all of your waking hours on the mechanics of survival, because if they have their way (to coin a phrase,) that's what you're going to be doing, and it's ALL you're going to be doing.

You will spend every hour of every day foraging for food, fuel, a roof and walls. Gender neutral barefoot and pregnant.

The Bleaters are forever talking about "returning to the values..." of the country's founders. Well, those founders disagreed on an awful lot of things, but managed to compromise. There's a value. No question about returning to that one. The couldn't agree on the definition of a human being or an American (they settled on white males for the sake of getting past that sticky issue.) They COULD agree - at least implicitly - that said human being or American was essentially irrational when left to his own devices, and needed reigning in. After all, if they didn't, no government of any kind would be necessary.

The founders weren't called upon to define "country," either. It was axiomatic, they thought. But it isn't. They couldn't have foreseen the way America grew and changed and the complex ways that was to happen. So while some of their construction remains valid and universal, some of it.

So, adhering to the ideas of the founders is relatively reasonable policy, but adhering to all of the specifics and nothing else, is not.

If you want to freeze America in the 1700s, you get an America that's in the 1700s. This was an era without global trade, modern science, electricity, central heating and indoor plumbing. It was an era when you grew your own food and traded with your immediate neighbors for whatever else you needed. And it was an era when the ideas of modern medicine, insurance, and communication were unthought of.

Return to those times and you will be a plow horse or a seamstress.

The Bleaters are forever talking about small government. Small government's a great idea. Only problem is it doesn't prevent the kind of conflict in which large commerce can take place. It doesn't prevent poisoned dolls from killing your kids, it doesn't protect you against airplanes that fall out of the sky. It doesn't prevent you from the plague or aids or some guy coming over and shooting you for your unsafe SUV. Sure, there's waste. So?

Shrink the government and you're back plowing the back 40 -- unless your neighbors don't like the color of your skin, or that you don't go to church or they just decide they need more land and who cares about you?

Ah, you will argue, the founders wanted to protect property rights? Yeah. They did. But there were other rights they wanted to protect. Freedom of the press, freedom of and from religion, freedom of assembly. If you take those away, you take away the concept of all rights -- and property rights will fall to the greediest.

"Oh," the Bleaters will bleat, "we don't want to take away those rights, we want to preserve them."

No. That's just window dressing. They don't care about your rights. That's why we have government. Does it grow? Sure, that's the American way. Grow profits, grow wheat, grow space, grow opportunities. Just don't grow government?

We're growth obsessed. But if you grow one thing, everything grows. Including government.

No growth? You're pulling that plow from sunrise to sunset.

The Bleaters are forever bleating about opportunities. There ARE no opportunities when you're busy pulling that plow seven days a week. All you can do is plow and rest. And it better be on Sunday, not Saturday.

Lower taxes, grow the economy? Nonsense. Supply side only works when you create demand for supplies and when you price supplies reasonably. It was a one-shot and maybe an accident in the two years it seemed to work. Even the people who invented the concept backed away from it, and pretty quickly at that. Check out the post-Reagan history of David Stockman if you want more grist.

Lower taxes to promote investment? What really happens when you lower taxes? Do people invest? Some do. Not enough, not widely enough, not often enough. People sit on the money. Buying a Lexus is not an investment.

The Bleaters are predatory closet anarchists. They want to eliminate your protection against them. They know more about you than you know about yourself.

They know you're not going to start a company or a farm or an airline. No. What they want is to incarcerate you. Not in a formal prison, but in the prison of having to use all of your physical and mental stamina just to get through the day. They want you tethered to the plow.

The White House, starting with Jimmy Carter, but not coming full flower until now, has been opposing regulation -- even regulation that's already in place, funded and staffed. This has brought us to chaos in airlines, media ownership, meat processing, grain, forrestroy.

What's the point of chaos? Turning you into a plow horse. Keeping you off balance, worried, a prisoner and paralyzed.

They want to dictate your every move. They want you as a wage slave. They want to make you beg for their largess, which includes your medicine, your electricity, your transportation, your communication your fuel and your food.

And all the while, when they're feeding you their poisonous ideas, you are pulling the plow and over your shoulder telling them you love it and "please, sir, may I have some more?"

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.