Well I found something that the Comrade and I agree on. In the speech he delivered in Kansas yesterday, He was correct in saying that right now is what he called "a defining moment" for the nation. To both the Comrade as well as to me, though we're on different sides, this means that we right now have to pick: Do we want the USA to continue as a free country or do we want to crush it down into some kind of dictatorial socialist state?
We are making the decisions right now -- all of us, every citizen. If you don't vote and refuse to otherwise participate -- well, as Edmund Burke once said, "All that's needed for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." In other words, you might as well burn the flag.
Just to make this simple and squish it all into a handy metaphor, let's think about the Comrade's notion of "fairness."
"Fairness" to him is masses of little cookier-cutter people, all happy little cogs in a great big wheel driven by Washington, all with the same needs, the same ambitions, the same principles and beliefs. As Time magazine (or was it Newsweek?) claimed upon the Comrade's election "We're all socialists now."
On a discussion list a few years ago, I noted that communism destroys individuality. That claim was quickly countered by some dude with Ivy League credentials who corrected me by saying, "Have you ever read Marx? Marx was all about the individual."
My response: "All three volumes of Das Kaptal. But it doesn't work."
Why doesn't it work? Because when you have a single decision-maker for the whole nation, then the whole nation gets the same thing. We're all treated exactly the same. We have the same kinds of jobs, wear the same clothing, watch the same movies, read the same books, get the same health care, eat the same food, etc.
Washington is not going to say, "OK, how many pairs of white levis do you want? How many traditonal blue jeans? Embroidered denim? Anyone?" The government won't do that. For them, it's too damn inefficient. We will all have blue jeans, maybe, or whatever whim pops into the head of a particular decision-maker at that particular defining moment.
Like health care. You have cancer? Right now, the feds are determining First, Second, and Third lines of treatment. Doctors do the first. Doesn't work, they do the second. Still doesn't work, try the third. Still doesn't work... they'll give you some end-of-life counseling.
A Dr. Janda, who was campaigning for a congressional candidate in Michigan in 2010 gave a speech (it's on YouTube, look it up) about this treatment methodology. He had a patient with cancer and had tried the first two recommended treatments. They didn't work. The patient was compelled to go to Medicaid or some-such, which would not allow any but those recommended lines of treatment. Which had been tried and didn't work.
Yet Dr. Janda says that for him to try other therapies with the patient, he, the doctor, would have been fined $100,000.00.
This is the Comrade's notion of "fairness" in action. One size fits all, even if it means chopping a few inches off your legs or taking your head off. The prescription from Washington will fit. At least there will be no other options.
Then think in terms of rewards. Some crazy right-wing student went around to fellow students on campus, asking their views on "income fairness" and "redistribution of wealth." Apparently most of them thought it was only "fair" that rich people should be taxed a lot more to pay for what poorer people couldn't pay.
So then the right-winger asked, "Well, what about grades? You got an A in Biology, right? Why don't you take a B so that some failing student could at least get a C?"
Interestingly enough, the interviewed students didn't go for that idea. One of them stridently complained, "But I worked for that A!"
Yeah, and nobody works for money, do they? It just falls off the trees in autumn. Or maybe it just resides somehow in Daddy's magic check book.
In the Comrade's Kansas speech, he asked something to the effect, "Do you believe you're better off when you're left alone to fend for yourself, play by your own rules?"
Well. Yeah. Isn't that what freedom is? Live by your own lights?
What are the options? Tax the rich? Cripple industry? Bankrupt and hamstring the financial industry? Nationalize the auto industry? Fork over corporations to labor leaders? Keep supporting dirt-poor backwards nations by refusing to develop our own fuel resources? Give our science to Red China for development and production by slave labor?
Anybody want to live in that kind of world? Nothing is your own, not even your mind and future. How many people are going to work and work and work, as they do now, if they don't get to keep what they earn? That wasn't very successful in the slave South -- except for the slave owners -- and I really doubt it will work now. Especially not with a bunch of infantile types schooled in nothing but "the world owes me a living."
Yes. This is a defining moment. And the outcome is up to all of us as citizens and voters. At least right now we still have a choice.
And I suspect the Comrade is going to lose this one.
Save the Republic.
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