Reflections on right wing ideology underlying their approach to all issues...
I happened to be over at my parents' house this morning, and the TV was on in the background as I was helping my father with some things. At one point there was a lull in our conversation, and I started hearing what was being said on the TV, rather than it just being background noise. As it happens, it was a western, probably made in the 70s or so, and at that point in time the 'school marm' was teaching an evening class on reading to adults of the community. One student had just read 'The duck swims on the lake.' off the chalk board, when a younger looking, well dressed man, perhaps in his 30s, then said 'The duck may swim on the lake, but my Father owns the lake.' The teacher, irritated, dismissed the class for the night, but the rich scion type came up and tried to get her to 'go on a picnic' with him. When she said no, he pulled the entitled 'Nobody says no to a 'whatever my name is' man' line out.
This rattled around my head for a while, then collided with something said about politics on MSNBC later in the day and got me thinking about money in politics. Now obviously, we all know the reason rich folks love to say that money is speech is that they have more money, and can use it to speak loudest to politicians, and make sure politicians work for them more than for the rest of us. But going back to the scene in the Western, it suddenly gelled for me just why Republicans always want to privatize everything, why they hate taxes, and why they love to talk about charity.
Control. Sure, they want to make money off privatization. And they hate to have even a smidgeon of their 'hard earned' money taken away. But beyond that, on a deeper level, taxes are an abstraction that prevents them from using their money to directly control those around them. Poverty is an economic club over a poor person's head, held in the hands of the wealthy, that says 'Do as I say, or die of starvation or exposure or disease.' When public services are provided to the rest of us non-wealthy through taxation, the wealthy don't get to hold that club, even though 'their money' is backing much of those services.
When services are privatized, the poor have to take out loans or subsist on charity. Both of which leave them directly vulnerable to that economic club over their head. When the rich banker's son wants to make demands, 'No one can say no' without directly endangering themselves by risking his anger. Maybe he holds the lease to your house, or has loans out to the company where you work.
Every time a right winger works to remove another layer of the social safety net, to tear holes in it and leave the poor or middle class less secure, it's to make them more vulnerable to economic blackmail. It's a way to impose sanctions on the 99% to try to gain even more direct control over what we can and can not do by controlling our economics. To tear down the barriers of government by the people, for the people that loosen the control the haves have over the have nots.
Sure they want your money. But they want power over your lives even more. The Kochs have more money than they can spend, can continue to make ever more money. But that's not enough. They want to be able to hold their giant economic club over the heads of every other American, in an America where we're all truly on our own, without a government that can feed us when we're hungry, give us medical care when we're sick. They want us back at the 'company store', dependent upon them for everything, and able to be controlled and be born as they believe we should be born, live as they believe we should live, die as they believe we should die.
They don't want us to be 'independent'. They just want to make sure we're dependent upon them, not 'the government'.
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