George Will should probably drag his sorry ass down to the Wall Street protests and ask some people about the “consent of the governed.” Ironically, what he’s trying to sell is less attractive than Ford’s Edsel. This was so predictable that Mayor Bloomberg literally predicted it just a day or two before the protests started:
“You have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs, that’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kind of riots here,” Bloomberg said on his Friday morning radio show.”
So far, the people in the streets are not rioting. Instead, the police are rioting. This is what happens when you have sustained high unemployment and the country’s plutocrats and their political party refuse to even offer the hope that something can be done about it. We’ve had thirty years of Reaganomics in this country and nothing is trickling down (if you need to read it in graph form, read it in graph form). In 2009, when taxes were at their lowest level since 1950, the right decided we are all Taxed Enough Already and formed the TEA Party. Then they complained about the deficit. It’s so stupid you could cry.
George Will sees none of this. Or, maybe, he is paid not to see it. He thinks liberals just want to regulate everything for the hell of it.
The project is to dilute the concept of individualism, thereby refuting respect for the individual’s zone of sovereignty. The regulatory state, liberalism’s instrument, constantly tries to contract that zone — for the individual’s own good, it says.
In his world, our desire for food that won’t make us ill and medicine that won’t kill us and vehicles that won’t catch on fire and banks that don’t destroy the global economy and cost us our jobs…all of that is nothing but an infringement on the individual’s pursuit of happiness. It’s all tyrannical in nature.
He ridicules Elizabeth Warren for saying the following:
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”
How does Will respond to this? He says it’s a strawman argument because no one disagrees. And then he disagrees.
Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.
How’s that for Stupid? What are taxes but a portion the government considers its share? And what is politics but a battle over how big that share should be and how it should be allocated? Until recently, no political party had the gall to suggest that there should be no share at all. Until recently, no party operated under the dogma that taxes should always be lowered and never raised, regardless of circumstances (unless its the regressive payroll tax, then it should be raised). George Will can go on and on about how he’s earned all his money as an individual and the government isn’t entitled to any share of it. Pretty soon he’ll find out why rich people have gladly paid taxes for centuries. Yeah, they need the power grids and roads and the harbors and the airports. But they also need the police and power of the State to protect them from hordes of people who will only tolerate their wealth as long as it is shared in the form of jobs and an education and opportunity.
In the end, after all the arguments have died down, taxes keep the pitchforks at bay.
