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.
Libertarian ideology has gone mainstream under cover of the obama derangement clown show. George Will, as a company man, knows it’s his job to pretend like the right has always been bonkers and there’s been no change since colonial times for all intents and purposes.
And yet there he remains, year after year, getting big checks for his analysis.
Will is a “kept intellectual”. He will discuss government and society but corporations never have a role or responsibility in this apparently. Well, they pay for his availability on all channels so he can’t afford to put the finger on them (oops, was there a pun there?).
The over-reaching he engages in through discussion of his pet concepts just points out how much he is lost in thought and how Warren is focused, down-to-earth on actual flesh and blood people. The extremist terms he uses to paint the differences he sees in his own head are so nuts:
How did “society’s creative complexity” work out in the financial world in 2005-2008? How does he defend the financial industry’s “creative complexity” with their deceptive loan hucksters, to the bonus laden financial product marketing gurus, to the ratings agencies…
Man, you are forgetting that the problem is regulation.
It’s really kind of frustrating, because Will’s comments are so wrong and so disingenuous in so many ways that it’s hard to even know where to start. So I will just say that to anyone who reads Warren’s comments without the benefit of Will’s magic collectivist decoder ring, it should be perfectly clear that all she’s really saying is that if you want roads, education, police, and fire protection, you have to be willing to pay for those things.
you read Bobo and Will so I don’t have to.
thank you
The real wankers of the day are Katrina whatever the f*ck her last name is and Paul Krugman who will use anything as an attack on the President while saying NOTHING about Republicans!
that’s a load of bullshit, NMP. Krugman constantly criticizes the republicans. CONSTANTLY. Same with Katrina vanden Heuvel. CONSTANTLY.
You are upset because they also criticize the president, and that’s fine. But it is simply not true, and i can prove it, that Krugman and vanden Heuvel say “NOTHING about republicans.”
You are full of bullsh*t! I’m speaking specifically of their comments TODAY! Katrina tweeted an attack on the President for not endorsing OWS. Even you can admit that is juvenile political advocacy. And Krugman conflates Republicans and the Obama Administration as the impetus for OWS! WTF?! I’ll give ’til Monday when the professional left starts turning OWS into a third party movement.
“I’ll give ’til Monday when the professional left starts turning OWS into a third party movement.” In their dreams! On this planet the “professional left” couldn’t organize a bake sale.
Grass-roots union people and community organizers have been involved in this since the beginning.
http://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2011/10/04/unions-and-community-organizations-may-not-be-new
-additions-to-occupy-wall-street-after-all/
Edmund Burke called. He wants to know if it’s true that George Will has been sneaking out at night with Ayn Rand, and is that why he never writes about “Burkean conservatism” any more.
I don’t really care what these corporate assholes say. At this point, the more they say it, the more they implicate themselves.
I’ve been thinking about this whole OWS — about how they don’t have a list of demands, etc.
They don’t need a list of demands. Everybody knows what this is about. Demands would only give the MSM some handles for their usual perception control operation.
When they say “We re the 99%”, that is pretty much the truth. I have never sen a grass roots movement with so much support, tacit or otherwise Not the whole Vietnam protest era had anything close. Why? Because everybody hates Wall Street, they all know why and they are right.
Sorry, most of the Tea Party loves Wall Street. And of course Wall Street loves itself to pieces. But everybody else.
And this is not going to go against Obama. That’s another fantasy of the trolls and emoprogs.
Here’s the deal.
Law and custom determine the economic arrangements of society, including what are property rights and whose they are.
Conservatives say they seek a society in which the market decides all and all are as free as possible from “our enemy, the state.”
But the market is a chimera, and what they advertise as freedom for all is abject servitude for the many on behalf of the few.
Conservatives seek arrangements that create an ownership class and empower it to control unilaterally the labor and lives of the many, deciding what wealth they will create, the conditions under which it will be created, and what will be their share.
The result is that the many, under the harshest of conditions, produce little for themselves and much for the few.
Conservatives call such arrangements “individualism,” “the free market,” and “liberty.”
Liberals call such arrangements “exploitation,” “greed,” and (sometimes, among the brave) “wage slavery.”
Liberals seek arrangements that in some measure, through the state, empower the many to affect what wealth they will create, the conditions under which it will be created, and what will be their share.
The result is that the conditions under which they labor are much better, and the share of the many in what they create is greater.
Liberals call such arrangements “social democracy,” “popular sovereignty,” and “social solidarity.”
Conservatives call them “collectivism” and sometimes “totalitarianism.”
Clear, now?