Well, It’s Pretty Done I Guess

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Democrats, GOP, government, poltiical theory, Rousseau

We got some sort of a deal. I’m not liking a lot of it. It could have been better, but then again, it could have been worse. I don’t care to examine it in detail. I’m just tired.

Through all this I’ve been reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I like tomes, and this is about average. Not the best written by far, but a readable story. Ayn Rand is another thing. She paints caricatures of characters. They, be they Capitalists or Progressives, are so distorted as to be laughable.

After nearly three hundred pages, I suddenly sat back and went, “Whoa, this is the bible that people like Rand Paul and Paul Ryan demand their staffs read!” I mean, it’s laughable and scary at the same time. The Capitalists are brilliant and virile, the progressives are dull and soft. How anyone could base a political and economic philosophy on such fantasy is beyond me.

Yet, I recognized too that there is a deep and ultimately traversable chasm between most Democrats and most Republicans. We don’t see the world at all the same. And it is this divide, strengthened by the extreme right who are wickedly ill-informed yet ideological fanatics, that makes governing a near impossibility.

Rousseau talked about a “social compact” between government and the people:

Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.

The devil is of course in the details. Republicans would argue that any such contract is merely for those services that individuals cannot do themselves, since as defense from foreign countries, and provisions for a monetary system, mail, and roads. Beyond that Republicans prefer that all people are free to create a livelihood and make individual agreements as they wish without government interference. If government does anything, it protects the right of business to operate unfettered by loathsome state or local regulation.

Democrats, I believe, see the compact as much more. Protection is not limited to merely physical defense, but involves a duty to take care of its vulnerable citizens such that the great worth of the state is used in part to protect those who are unable to successfully compete in the market place. Part of who they protect against is the insatiable greed of business.

No doubt the purist system that Republicans so love, once worked perfectly. We had the exactly perfect mix of farming/manufacturing/services ratio. We had the right amount of untamed, open land to explore and settle in. But all too soon our cities grew, and business ran up against competitions, and entrepreneurs looked for ways to get an edge. The easy choices were wages and working conditions. As the poor grew in size, government stepped in to regulate and then protect those who individually had no leverage against big business.

Republicans call Democrats “bleeding liberals”. One of the reasons the debt ceiling crisis careened perilously close to the edge was that Republicans knew that Democrats would protect the “nanny state” items of social security, medicare and so forth in return for giving in on taxing the most wealthy at a fair rate. And they were mostly right in this.

Republicans see the state of our country much as Eisenhower viewed the European theater before Normandy. The war was going badly, and we were on the brink of losing. Only a major strike, accepting severe losses could turn the tide. Republicans see the state of the US much the same. Hopelessly mired in a welfare mentality, with increasing numbers dependent and expecting the government to support them, they are willing, to accept the high “losses” that will accrue via draconian cuts in welfare “entitlement” programs. They see them as necessary pain to be endured. Of course the pain is not going to be born by them.

They of course cannot voice this Republican truth. To do so would be to court annihilation at the ballot box. That is why you hear the perverse crap of “in a recession you cannot raise taxes.” Nobody ever bothers to stop them there and ask why. No economist backs them up on this. Taxes up or down don’t correlate to the economy quite simply. And worse, the Bush tax cuts never created a single job. Where were all those “job creators” the GOP speaks of?

No, the mantras of no taxes in a recession, and “we have a spending problem” are simply untruths used to avoid the philosophical position that the only way to right the ship of state is to dismantle all social programs. Surely a bloodbath of misery will follow, but when the dust settles and the sun returns, we will have a country reduced to able-bodied and Protestant work-ethic workers, ready to dig in and make America great again.

That is pure Ayn Rand. It is fantasy. It is not even good fantasy. It is not rational economics 101. It is not good political theory. It is nothing but the wilful desire of business interests who have paid for their politicians, their twisted think tank “reports”, and ultimately their puppet TeaPeople who like lap-dogs, scurry around the table looking for the scraps that are always promised but never appear.

It is greed, unbridled, bloodthirsty, take no prisoners greed. Who says that Corporatocracy was not just another word for ARISTOCRACY. Let them eat cake!

 

Self-Serving Interpretations

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Christianists, David Barton, Enlightenment, fundamentalism, John Locke, Matthew, minimum wage, religious right, Rousseau, Vineyard owner

I haven’t posted much here lately of a religious nature. And I usually describe this blog as part political commentary and part religious commentary.

Yet, I’ve been sensitive (probably too much so) to the fact that a good many of my readers are either agnostics or atheists and have little or no interest in things spiritual.

But, of late, I’ve been thinking hard about David Barton and his awful pretense of “historical” revising. We all know of course, his proclivity to proclaim that America was “founded on Christian principles.” While we agree that most of the Founding Fathers were Christian in some form or another, it is equally clear that the dangers of a religious-political union were well-known from history and there was a deliberate determination to not allow that unholy alliance to be the government of the new nation.

Barton, who has a BA from Oral Roberts University (which tells you a lot in and of itself) in religious education, has the temerity to hold himself out as “expert on historical and constitutional issues.” What he actually does, is cherry pick statements from historical documents and the bible and create a web of arguments that favor his view–that America is meant to be a nation ruled by Christian principles (supposedly as defined by him and others who agree with his fundamentalist notions).

Ironically, the Founding Fathers were steeped in exactly the opposite philosophy. The long history of the Roman Church and its marriage with the kings of Europe served an object lesson in how not to govern. Moreover, the FF were men of the Enlightenment, and any high school student in the US knows that they were deeply influenced by John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, both Enlightenment thinkers, who posited that man was more than capable of learning the secrets of nature and governing himself. One’s personal belief in a deity, was just that, personal.

One of the dangers of people like Barton is that they use their “talents” to create a history that favors their agenda and that of the party they affiliate with. In this case, Barton provides the “philosophical” underpinnings to the Republican notions of free market economies unfettered from regulation of any kind. In other words, toss out all the anti-trust, anti-child labor, minimum wage, safe working conditions legislation. This is God’s will.

Of particular interest to me as of late is the continuing claim that “Jesus opposed the minimum wage.” Setting aside for a moment the obvious idiocy of this, since there is no reference to “minimum wage” in the bible, let us examine the crux of the argument.

Most often cited in this discussion is Matthew 20: 1-16. In this parable, a wealthy vineyard owner seeks day workers for his fields. In the morning he finds some and agrees to a wage, and sends them out. At noon, some more are found, and they too are sent to the fields. Late in the work day, a few more are found and sent for a hour’s work.

As the men line up for payment, those who worked a full day are chagrined to see that the owner is paying those who worked only an hour the same wage as those who worked a full day. They complain. The vineyard owner points out that they agreed to their wage before they began working. What is it to them how he deals with others? And here is the phrase that the Christianists hang their hat on:

“Have I no right to do what I like with my own?”

To the so-called Christian who wants to protect his/her own wallet, more lovely words were never spoken. Why God says that a business owner has the right to do with his money as he wishes! The government has no right to order them to pay people any set sum of money!

Such greedy and selfish people virtually ignore the obvious point Jesus makes, and see nothing but that one sentence; that along with various verses strewn throughout the psalms and scriptures which talk about not placing undue emphasis on wealth. (Except the wealthy I guess did place a lot of emphasis on money in order to become so.)

This is then married to the “Jesus never said that Rome should care for the poor” and “it’s the job of charitable works to take care of the poor” (the poor being those people we conclude are deserving). There you have it. A perfectly constructed argument that allows “Christians” to keep their money in their pockets and the government out of social safety-nets. (An amazingly high percentage of these fools do take their Social Security and Medicare when they reach retirement. Shocking isn’t it?)

Actually the clear import of the parable is this: The vineowner was a good man. He recognized that all those who worked for him that day had to eat and probably had families they had to feed. He had no idea what may have prevented the later arrivals from getting to the town square earlier. Who knows how far they traveled to seek work?

He provided a decent wage to all who worked because they had themselves and their families to support. He recognized the need to make sure that all were cared for. If you struck an agreed-upon bargain, what was it to you if the owner struck more favorable bargains with others? The implication is, that the long-day workers were the greedy ones! They wanted more if the owner was paying the latest workers a “living” wage.

This is the kind of thing that fundamentalists do with scripture, twisting and dishonoring it in order to serve their personal desires. And of course, in doing so, they dishonor God, the Bible, and other Christians.

And sad to say, Barton continues to be the darling of the likes of Bachmann, Huckabee and Gingrich and others who play to the fears and greed of the “religious right.” 

Related articles

• Liars for Jesus: Exposing David Barton and Other Revisionists (atheistrev.com)
• GOP’s Favorite Fake Historian Spins The New York Times (alternet.org)
• Lying: A Virtue (aafwaterloo.wordpress.com)
• David Barton Claims Founding Fathers Debated Creation/Evolution (jonathanturley.org)