Our response to a comment at Major Conflict, under the post, “The Song Remains the Same,” provided a chance to fire back at one all-too-typical regurgitation of conservative conventional wisdom.
We hope using the resulting broadside for a post doesn’t strike you as too self-indulgent.
First, the part of a comment from someone who calls him/herself T. Paine, to which we responded:
The problem is that once these entitlement programs are entrenched in our society and Grandma etc becomes dependent upon these government programs to take care of her, she no longer looks to do so herself.
Then, our response:
Would that be like the painfully obvious moral hazard benefiting corporate America so well and so often lo these many years?
Look, Paine, there will always be a relatively small contingent of two kinds of people, in our society or any society.
One contingent is made up of passive-dependent personality types. They are by their nature prone to latch on to any path they see as easier, any sugar daddy they think will take good care of them, any government handout they can partake of. There’s always a few, and short of putting them in forced-labor camps where they have to work hard to eat, you’re not going to change them.
The other and opposite contingent is made up of real go-getters. The swamp can be neck deep, the sky can be falling, the economy can be in the dumps, but these people will find a way to make things work for them. They will get rich or add to their wealth. Come the apocalypse, they’ll go out selling last-minute salvation insurance (guaranteed or double your money back) and pocketing wads of money.
The great majority of Americans don’t fit into either category. They’re not holdouts for deals too good to be true. They don’t expect a free ride on someone else’s dollar. They know better than to expect something for nothing. What they do want and expect is a fair shake and a chance to share risks and pool assets for the common good.
Ruminate on that last part, Paine, because it can repair the blind spot in your understanding of things. People who choose to live together in society share common needs, risks,even fears. They can benefit from working together, pooling resources, even bailing out the unfortunate and unlucky in their midst. They have a perfect right to manage things in their society that way, too, if that’s what a majority of them want.
So it is that we have Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Did Social Security cause people to quit saving/investing on their own for retirement? If you think so, explain the explosive growth in mutual funds and 401k’s over the last 25 years. Has the fact Medicare gives most of the 65-and-older set a chance to buy health insurance they can begin to afford ruined insurance companies’ chances to make money off these people? Hardly, as all the supplementary and Medicare Advantage plans make clear.
I’ll tell you what is far more likely to make large numbers of non-passive-dependent Americans throw up their hands, give up and let government, charity, the underground economy or whatever meet their needs for survival. It’s our “screw you if you’re not rich and fabulously successful,” rigged-market economic system.
That would be the system that honors wealth, whether inherited or gotten through shady dealing, but does not honor labor. That would be the system that rewards the rich for being rich and sticks it to the rest for not being rich — all the while spinning their greed and selfishness in terms of rugged individualism and pie-in-the-sky blather about growing the economy.
That would be the system with zero job security; frequent, lengthy layoffs; a reckless, predatory financial industry; and a load of “representatives” in government who are sold out to the people with big money.
If things are allowed to continue on the path of the last 30 years, we’ll either have millions of people who’ve just given up or we’ll have some kind of revolution. And if it’s the latter, I say don’t worry about the lawyers, this time we get the lobbyists first — and the people who hired them second.
The divide between left and right seems to be getting wider and wider, good arguments should advance the discussion. There is no advancing of the dialogue in the current climate of back and forth.
The argument from the left is all defensive and from the right attack, attack, attack. As you point out the vast majority of Americans are neither freeloaders, nor are they predatory opportunists, these are the people that hold the country together and do most of the work that keeps the infrastructure intact. The hard working majority are the targets for the rhetoric spewing out from all media outlets and confusion reigns. The waters are so muddy (on purpose), deciding what is true and what is a lie, a person would have to dedicate a big chunk of their day, every day, analyzing all available information. So, making a decision on what is right or wrong, becomes hit or miss, guesswork or what newspaper or news channel you watch. So, it all comes down to fear, the side that can scare the most people, will get their attention. And the Right is definitely, not only the party of fear, but also the party to fear.
There are always free-loaders; one can obsess about them or recognize it and move on or, if the free-loaders are large corporations, try to decrease their taxes.
This ridiculous idea of dependency is at least as old as welfare reform 30 years ago, when it was proclaimed to be a positive thing to take welfare benefits away from recipients — the “fat lazy-ass” theory, often with racial epithets added.
There’s an interesting aspect to this gilded-age meme about riff-raff that I hadn’t noticed before. We know that the very rich, very conservative regard the poor as being in that condition due to their own moral failing — for being bad people — but they also seem to feel it’s genetic in some way, promulgating this idea that if we’d just stop keeping the poor alive then they’d all die off and everyone would be rich and happy — and pay no taxes!
Excellent response. Major Conflict has gotten some really intense debates over there lately. The 2 resident righties over there — T. Paine and the other one — are at least generally civil, and a lot more coherent than my personal chia pet at my blog.
But they sure do recycle the tired old libertarian self-reliance bootstraps rhetoric. If such-and-such government program gets passed, we’ll all deteriorate into a nation of 300 million lazy worthless parasites who just lie there waiting for their next handout. Etc.
Well said, Holte. At some point the hard-working, nonwealthy people of this country will have to make a sustained effort at paying attention. They’re going to have to persist through election cycles until they get what they want and know is in their longterm best interest. But to get there, they’re going to have to listen to those making sense, think clearly and tune out the fearmongers, naysayers and those trying to appeal to the lesser angels of their nature. That’s a tall order, especially these days, but I have to believe it’s least possible.
Jeff, I once had a teacher who opined that if the only people working were the ones doing it purely for the money, there would be lots fewer people working, at least in paycheck jobs. I think he was right. Your observation about the notion held by too many of the well off and political right, that the poor are poor because they’re morally deficient and/or congenitally lazy is true. It’s probably subconcious in many of them, but it comes out in things they say and write that it’s there.
Thanks, Tom. I agree about Paine being civil. The other one’s another matter. As I’ve said many times, the self-reliance argument had a lot more validity when there was free open land in the West that the poor and those down on their luck could move to. Everything changed when that option ended, but those on the right still carry the notion as if we were still living in the 1880′s.
Why can’t the feds find someone to type up my comments so I can spend my time surfing for pictures of scantily-clad babes while waiting for my government check? As a commie pinko, I’m tired of doing stuff for myself.
I’ll tell you what is far more likely to make large numbers of non-passive-dependent Americans throw up their hands, give up and let government, charity, the underground economy or whatever meet their needs for survival. It’s our “screw you if you’re not rich and fabulously successful,” rigged-market economic system.
bingo, you nailed it! Excellent post, SW. All most of us want is to have the table leveled, at least just a bit. It gets tiring being constantly at the mercy of a faceless corporation which only exists for one reason: profit for shareholders. Corporations don’t actually exist to make anything or to better life in general, that is just a byproduct of the profit-making reason for their existence.
I’ll have to take a walkabout to the site you are responding to…sounds like a barrel of monkeys.
And the great thing about blogging on one’s own site is the ability to indulge in a little self-indulgence, which I actually quite enjoy every now and then
Randal, you just have to get rich. Then, you won’t have to do stuff for yourself. Well, not much. Just give your vote and pots of money to Republican candidates. Then sit back and watch as the benefits of private enterprise, government largesse, tax exemptions and much, much more flow your way, with the rest of the suckers paying for most of it.
Bee, as a guy who called into Air America Monday said (paraphrasing), corporations, big banks and the like are about making their shareholders rich and evading government interference. They (the people who run them) would throw their own mother under a train if that would make them an extra dollar. OK, that last might be an exaggeration, but the rest was right on.
We don’t have to accept this as the normal state of things. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The notion that the rich are “special” entitled people has existed in this country since the time of the Puritans, when Roger Williams fled to Rhode Island to try to set up a just society in the Americas.
The notion has always had a basis in race as well, and eugenics is very popular among the Freeper set. What is laughable to a mongrel like me is, if you threw me and the Bush clan out in the woods with no support from anywhere, I’d still be alive in 2 weeks, unlike these supposedly superior types. The “pull yourself up” set has generally had their asses wiped for them their whole lives, and themselves constitute a de facto entitlement class that has absolutely destroyed this country.
You’re so right, J.R. Do any reading about George W. Bush’s pre-presidential life, and you see where time and again he benefited from his father and others giving him a leg up, giving him a pass when he screwed up, and family friends and retainers pulling his coals out of one fire after another. To win the White House in 2000, Bush required $150 million, the full force of the countrys’ right wing, its noise machine, a whole bunch of hired hands to raise hell in Florida, plus a majority of Supreme Court justices. Some rugged individualist. Some self-made success.