"The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life...the children; those who are in the twilight of life...the elderly; and those who are in the shadow of life...the sick, the needy, and the disabled." Hubert Humphrey
--In this Depression, we debate the practicality (not the morality) of public works to stimulate employment while the private marketplace has misplaced its magic. Leftists call for more New Deal projects, funded by government through borrowing and taxes on high incomes. Right-wingers claim that make-work does little to alleviate long-term unemployment, and that government must reduce spending so that a solid dollar will eventually restore confidence. Comparing a country to a family, which in hard times must cut back on spending, conservatives hold that government must do the same. Austerity seems to make sense, in a traditional family values way. But the argument is deceptively simple, so it can be used to deceive.
--The austerity position's simplicity ignores the actual concept of family. In the first place, when the family is financially strapped, does Dad get a new Cadillac? Does he get to buy new guns? While Grandma and the kids are doing without, does Dad get a new yacht? And what about Junior? He just got home from the wars, and is having problems adjusting. And then there's that teen-aged daughter, who somehow got herself in a "family way." The family analogies can go on and on. What we have here is not a hard-up family, but one with psychopathically misplaced priorities.
--People who use the "horse sense" family analogy relate to the Tea Party, still live in relative comfort, and tell other people to practice austerity. Perceiving no threat to themselves, they feel government spending only means higher taxes for useless programs. Poverty, unemployment, sickness, homelessness are things that happen to other people, other families. As to the country they compare the family to--well, their country is doing just fine. Somebody else's country (a country that elected a president who does not belong) is asking for government handouts, and might need to be cast adrift. People in the right country, the ones with "horse sense" need no government help...never did. Delusional fallacies are hard to refute with facts. The Tea Partiers' most dangerous delusion has to be that they share a love of rugged individualism with the ruling elite in America, believing the rulers will not use them to divide the workers from each other, and having done so, continue robbing everyone. History shows that in the latter nineteenth century, before Mussolini actually defined fascism as the merging of government with corporations, we had that situation in America. And those no-nonsense Americans helped the plutocrats to power, and were paid rather poorly for it.
--Using that horse sense, we turned a wilderness continent into a land of productive farms and factories, simultaneously denuding forests, polluting the sky, and turning rivers into flaming cesspools. At the same time a tiny minority hijacked most of the continent's wealth, to the country's economic and social detriment. We learned our lesson and delivered the New Deal, but in the last thirty or forty years, collective amnesia has taken hold. Ignoring the past, we are dooming ourselves to repeat it. The world is changing though, and despite the fact some of us still retain material comforts, rapid change makes emotional and mental comfort hard to find. Electronic media put us all in instant touch with everyone, allowing the world to intrude on what we thought had been a pretty nice situation. The tendency to circle the wagons and keep out the rest of the world is growing, though the world is already inside the circle. Any attempt to secure a bright future based on an unrealistic sense of the past has already failed.
--The past the Tea Partiers are seeking is that halcyon time when they felt they shared with the heads of major corporations the same values: hard work and self-reliance. Television heroes such as Jim Anderson, Ward Cleaver, and Jim Newton weren't rich, but they earned a living, just like the wholesome, no-nonsense Americans who watched them. And times were getting better. The people who did not share in the boom times: minorities, foreigners, people who were different--still received more than they deserved. But now, those who were left out are getting in, and the boom times are over. The good times, the Tea Partiers believe, cannot return until the social and economic scales are restored to what they were. Bring back prosperity by eliminating gains made by people who never really earned them anyway--how deceptively simple.
--But will the corporate heads, the tremendously wealthy, the one percent, willing give up the gains they have made since those good old days? Common sense says "No." So much for family values.
They don't care.
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