Going Gault is all the rage. Greed, selfishness, and double dealing have so benighted and beguiled this Tea Party Libertarian (maximum freedom, minimum government) faction that they are intent on staging a Lansing Capitol steps rally glorifying a complete fiction. They purport to thus reveal the real character of a "true American hero" who never lived outside the musty pages of a huge tome of godless blather. How has St. Ayn become a rally point to further the Tea Party tax starvatin of civic society? Through Delusion.
If unchecked, the strident demands of those who cotton to the howls of this populist insurgency will take the country over the edge. To so strip down Michigan and the country, as is planned by the rancorous Tea factions, may well take the state and national economy over the edge, beyond a double dip recession into a true modern economic depression. The impact of such an event would be catastrophic in degree and intensity.
Tea Party Politics Are Unsustainable and Dangerous
Ordinary Americans, regular Michiganders, want a working government, they want an honest government, they want a caring government. Michiganders have expressed, in recent statewide polling, that they would support an INCREASE IN TAXES to get the state through the present crisis. This sentiment has fallen on arrogantly deaf Teapartisan ears.
Concerned citizens clearly understand that good government comes with a price tag.
Our caring citizens know that, in this modern age, the costs of health care are horrendous; spiraling out of control-even for the insured. They know that providing a safety net for some is essential.
Sensible citizens know and want many kinds of service (necessities) that only government can provide:
1) Well-maintained highways, bridges and roads
2) Affordable colleges and universities,
3) Excellent public schools in the neighborhood,
4) Care for veterans given by employees of government not mercenary care providers,
5) Professional police forces and able firefighters,
6) Safe food and drugs,
7) Honest measures for gasoline purchases,
8) Regulated investments,
9) Federal insurance on savings,
10) A highly skilled national disease control agency,
11) National defense,
12) Maintenance and construction of national monuments,
13) Wildlife preserves, greenways and parks,
14) Standards for safe drilling for oil and gas,
15) High standards protection by regulation and inspection of our aging nuclear power plants,
16) Clean water and air,
And much more....
Tea Party Dogma; "no new taxes" and "cuts-only budgeting" are disrespectful and dead set to remove from our lives many of the qualities of the services and standards listed above. There is no going back to their idealized "freedoms" in a primitive world of governance Teapartisans fancy-the world of Going Gault. Paying taxes makes them very angry! They firmly, yet wrongly, believe they can go it alone; no reverence for common goals or community good.
Yet, honest politicians, where you can find them, know that we find ourselves victims of much recent bad policy and corrupted leadership. No one speaks of G.W. Bush. The blunders and bad judgment of his tenure are anathema, even to conservative Republicans. They act as though Bush II never existed, and deny the heavy burden he placed on us. It is the greatest Republican hypocrisy not to own the immense damage done America by George W. Bush, et al..
GWB was not a fiction. His legacy is a tremendous dead weight on our land. His war making, his overspending, and lack of restraint on corruption, his unprecedented running up the national debt, and inability to deal with fraud on Wall Street and in the nation's largest banks; all this lingers like a dead albatross hung on the national spirit and decimating the nation's economy.
What was done with TARP, automaker and bank bailouts, was in direct response to George W. Bush's ineptitude and failure to lead, to act appropriately. Shifting the emphasis on Bush's rightful portion of a unprecedented national debt, putting it on the present administration is specious. It will take years to recover from the origins of our national debt under Bush. It will years to extract ourselves from the Near Eastern turmoil and Asian war. The regional Mediterranean/Arab unrest agitated by the Bush Doctrine is most alarming and dangerous.
"Who is John Gault?" Ayn Rand
If we are to hail a "John Gault" to lead us out of this our national morass, it won't be because of a new film flick extolled by Ron Paul and the Tea Party, depicting the godless, atheistic, and anti-society rants that come ripped from the fiction filled novel, Atlas Shrugged and the twisted mind of Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, (1905 "1982), known to most as the beguiling Ayn Rand.
Enlightenment, will come from a real man who will lead America out of its distress with adroit skills and great dedication. He will be man not given to fatuous fictions:
"Man-every man-is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life." - Ayn Rand
There you have it. The Randian antithesis of the Judeo-Christian ethic: John Gault does what is "right in his own eyes" ergo "his own happiness" is the "highest moral purpose of his life." One man alone is more important than his place in family, religious community, the public commons or join endeavors.
How does this fit the Michigan GOP/Tea Party's brouhaha? The Teapartisan Mantra: Paying taxes makes me unhappy, thus it is not in my personal, individualistic "self-interest," it must be evil. I will not pay what may be called "my share" to maintain and enhance community, it's my money and the government taking it by taxation is coercion. How benighted! Would the GOP/Tea Party have us believe: A man has no real responsibility outside himself and his own selfish greed? Ayn Rand Raises Egoism to a Virtue.
"I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."
-- Ayn Rand, September 1971 in "Brief Summary", The Objectivist
Original Post.
No comments:
Post a Comment