Greg Sargent and Kevin Drum seem to think so, at least conditionally — one idea being that, as Greg wrote me on Twitter, “people support jobs creation policies but see govt failing to enact them,” the upshot being that anti-government sentiment may be a product of ineffective government, not just a government that has grown too big.
To lay the foundation for the thesis, Sargent points to a Pew Economic Mobility Project chart noting that 54% of Americans believe that government helps the rich “a great deal”, while only 6% believe the government helps people like them.
Sargent writes:
Why is it so widely assumed that polls showing high distrust in government automatically support the conservative narrative?
It’s true that multiple polls have shown recently that trust in government to do the right thing is at abysmal lows. And when those polls come out you routinely see Republican operatives Tweeting them gleefully. But the problem with those polls is they don’t probe why distrust in government is running so high. For all we know, some of the reasons for it could also support the liberal narrative. For instance, what if anti-government sentiment is running high because Congress isn’t passing jobs creation and fiscal policies — including tax hikes on the rich — that are supported by large majorities of the American people? Folks who aren’t tuned into the details of Senate procedure might not know why government isn’t acting on those policies; they might just see government failing them even as the crisis continues, and react accordingly.
Majorities say they want higher taxes on the rich and say wealth should be more even in this country. Congress isn’t hiking taxes on the rich. Fifty four percent tell Pew government protects the rich a “great deal,” versus a tiny minority who say they are getting helped by government. And at the same time, distrust in government is at historic highs. You think those things might be related? And how does all that bolster the right’s argument?
First off, let me just say that I believe Sargent overstates the degree of anti-government sentiment on the liberal left; but even taking his hypothetical at face value, what are we to make of the idea that anger at government is anger at the government’s failure to take and redistribute more wealth, or create more government programs — all of which would require higher taxes, more deficit spending, and greater debt? Or better, what do we make of the suggestion that anti-government sentiment doesn’t overwhelmingly redound to the “conservative narrative”?
My contention is that contemporary movement conservatism is almost by definition “anti-government” (that is, an explicit rejection of a government that has far exceeded its Constitutional mandates, more anti-Leviathan than anti-government), and that it was the TEA Party, with their anti-big government, pro-Constitution message that overwhelmingly carried the 2010 elections. And while it’s likely true, as Sargent and Drum assert, that many who self-identify as “liberal” have adopted an anti-government sentiment since 2010, it is worth plumbing their arguments to find out just how “liberal” these governmental critics are.
On the one hand, the logical end to those demanding ever more government to assure a kind of enforced social egalitarianism is a socialist police state, run largely by bureaucracies and disguised as a democracy; without such a system, enforcement of equal outcomes would be impossible, and disparities of income would return as a matter of course. Not surprisingly, Utopia requires a ruling class to keep order — and socialism generally stalls at its fascist stage.
On the other hand, there are those railing against banks, or Wall Street, or “the rich” because they believe Big Banking or Big Corporations are responsible for the income disparity they’ve been taught to watch out for. And yet a closer look reveals that what those people are railing against, though oftentimes they don’t realize it, is precisely the kind of crony capitalism that marks a corporatist economy — liberal fascism — itself posited as a necessary stage in the transformation from a capitalist society to a centralized socialist state by none other than Edward Bellamy in his Utopian blueprint, Looking Backwards.
That is, they are railing against the transition to democratic socialism and away from free market capitalism.
— All of which means that, far from adopting a leftist or liberal stance, these protesters — though they may identify with liberalism or the left — are actually adopting a conservative position, one that finds a home in, eg., the populist conservative rhetoric of Sarah Palin, or the libertarian rhetoric of any number of free market economic theorists, which rejects the kind of government “partnerships” with big business that create cozy government / client relationships. Cass Sunstein this ain’t.
Where Sargent errs is in conflating “conservative” with Republican. The “conservative narrative” is not necessarily the Republican narrative, as any who’ve followed the GOP establishment’s clashes with the TEA Party implicitly understands. Republicans may be too quick to claim benefit from anti-government sentiment. But conservatives should take heart that, if anything, the underpinnings of their philosophy is crossing the political divide, much as it did with Reagan Democrats in the 70s and 80s.
Many of those who are angry at government and identify politically with the left aren’t angry because they reject capitalism (those who do are a loud, drum-circling minority). Instead, they are angry at the kind of capitalism that is the result of cozy relationships between government and corporations. They’ve been taught to direct their ire toward Big Business. But what they want is the separation of business and government — and that is a fundamentally conservative, anti-big government, free market stance.
Which benefits the conservative, constitutionalist movement.
Discuss.
I think many liberals are anti-government to the extent that the government is engaging in foreign policy of dubious morality or even legality, and are anti-government to the extent that the government suppresses speech that they like.
I don’t disagree with all of the above, mind you. I definitely disagree with the selective-free-speech thing.
They’re also anti-government to the extent to which the government is failing to adequately meddle in the economy, regulate industry, and provide services for everyone who can’t or won’t provide for themselves. Oh, and also ensure a living wage to absolutely everyone, even those who don’t want to work very hard. Because dignity and independence is good, and you can’t have dignity and independence unless the government is there to make sure you get it. Or something like that.
None of which probably look to them like a handout cornucopia; just a minimum of What Teh Government Should Do For You.
Which is not to say that conservatives are, in general, completely free of a desire to have the government do certain things that they approve of. But I think conservatives in general are wishing their government would not so much die off completely as not have a finger (or several) in each and every conceivable pie.
– Well then, there you have it. We can just chalk all this ineffective government talk up to a poorly informed electorate, at least that is, all of the non-progressive elements of the electorate.
– The fact that our Congress sits at an all time low of 9% favorability, why that’s just a strong indication that we’re confused.
– Nothing to see here folks…..move along.
– BTW, they tried to be clever, casting this meme in an intentionally distracting monolog, but this, along with some other recent examples, really is the start of the Socialists dusting off, and reintroducing, the time proven “bad application failure script” in anticipation of Bummblefucks supreme crash and burn.
– If you read past the hand waving and misdirection, this is just another “It failed because we didn’t give it a fair chance.” pile of leftist bullshit.
Two thoughts:
1) Gov’t this big is inherently ineffective.
2) Gov’t doesn’t help the rich, politicians do, for money, which the rich have.
3) Greg Sargent is a self-important buffoon*
*That’s not really a thought —more of a visceral reaction.
I can only reiterate that the professional Democrats that I work with every day are every bit as worried as I am that we’re saddling our kids with an unpayable debt. They’re every bit as unhappy as I am when they see young mothers refusing to marry their babydaddies because it would mean losing out on benefits which they obviously no longer need. They’re mad as hell about bailouts for the megabanks and agricorps when the local credit union and the family farmer are hung out to dry.
Yes, these professional Democrats repeat what they’ve been told to repeat. They support tax hikes on the rich, but they know it’s just for show, and that it won’t really address our deficits. They support alternative energy, but they know that most of the sector is composed of companies that soak up a lot more subsidy than they do sun or wind.
In short, these lifelong Democrats don’t really believe in their own arguments, and the objections they have to me and mine are based on the cartoons and straw men that they’ve been told I represent. Granted, my cow-orkers are almost all government types, so they have a better idea than most people when it comes to how the sausage is made. My acquaintances at the radio station are another story. They’re the True Believers, with the signed Amy Goodman books and the faded Air America bumper stickers. Thank Heavens they’re few in number.
Bottom line: the Left paints the Tea Party as wild-eyed racist Bible-thumping know-nothings, because if they ever allow word to get out that we’re just people who want to live in peace, without the government screwing up every part of out lives, tens of millions will flock to our banner. They know that we have the winning argument, and they’ll do anything, anything, to keep that argument from being heard. For out part, we need to keep spreading the word, and insisting that our neighbors give ten minutes of thought to the policies they think they support, having given no thought to those policies at all.
Where Sargent errs is in conflating “conservative” with Republican. The “conservative narrative” is not necessarily the Republican narrative, as any who’ve followed the GOP establishment’s clashes with the TEA Party implicitly understands.
Exactly. I hear the same conflation nearly daily from ‘liberal’ friends; this, shortly before the characterisation of ‘conservative’ as ‘far right’ or ‘lunatic fringe’ right. This is kind of reassuring, as it tells me that they don’t know their enemy.
We can Venn diagram it:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/10/14/the_tea_party_and_ows_in_venn_diagram_form.html
http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/diagramming-ows-vs-tea-party
http://althouse.blogspot.com/2011/10/very-simple-venn-diagram-of-where-tea.html
3) Greg Sargent is a self-important buffoon who doesn’t understand how to spell plumb line.
Fixed!
If all this so-called anti-government sentiment is really anti- ineffectual government, why isn’t Mitt Romney walking away with both the Republican nomination and the 2012 election? I mean, the man exudes bland, disinterested, technocratic managerial competence. He’s covered in it. Like hair gel.
We can always couch it in federalist terms. “We just want to cut the federal government back to its bare-bones minimum. That doesn’t mean that you have to stop stealing my money, though! Our individual states can continue to play Central Planner as much as they want. Shouldn’t take long to sort out which of the 50 have their shit together.”
– Ernst….some warning next time please. My monitor doesn’t take kindly to soda baths.
Echoing Ernst I see, I’m anti-bad government as all get out, though not particularly anti-government as such. Time was, we Americans had a government that more or less understood its proper bounds, but lost those bounds when it was brought to believe its politicial processes had become unqualifiedly “scientific” under a rubric of political science, as sociology and progressivism. Why can’t Mike Barone figure this stuff out?
Yet we hear just that label “anti-government” pasted onto the Tea Party quite frequently: “They don’t want government! Why do you Tea Party types want children to die in housefires when the Fire Department won’t show up?”
To the degree that there is something to this (let’s leave that aside for the moment), perhaps we could see some positive results from consistently showing that government simply can’t do what they want it to do.
Historical examples like Prohibition? Intellectual arguments like Hayek’s? A trip to Greece?
Conservatives are anti-government like Travis Coates is anti-dog.
If we had to wait for the Federal government to respond to housefires, all of our children WOULD die. What with all the paperwork, and all.
oh my unemployed people striking
Link
One aspect of minimal political competence in government is simply refraining from the commission of vast frauds and injustices upon the people being governed. If our government can’t cease squandering vast sums — hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars of the nation’s taxpayer’s wealth — what chance that it should be capable of performing a simpler “establish[ment]” of justice proclaimed in the Constitutional Preamble? Just what sort of justice is it that binds the hands and feet of the people so that they cannot move? What sort of justice can we expect when a tax-“code” can be written on which no two people can agree as to its meaning?
“What sort of justice can we expect when a tax-”code” can be written on which no two people can agree as to its meaning?”
– Our congress has never, to this day, passed a clear coherent taxation bill. Noonw wants to actually have to vote on such a bill.
– In other words there are some things just to hot to touch politically, so it will never happen under any circumstances, outside of a national vote.
– We are in desperate need of a Continental Congress, and a re-assertion of the Constitution. and I simply do not know how we can bring that about realistically.
So is a recent poll showing Hilary Clinton blowing out all the Republican candidates. That’s how perverse and pernicious the lie of the progressive narrative is.
This is no small problem. We’re indoctrinated.
Majorities say they want higher taxes on the rich and say wealth should be more even in this country. Congress isn’t hiking taxes on the rich.
majorities are stupid on econ 101. that’s why we have a representative republic.
majorities are stupid on econ 101. that’s why we have a representative republic.
Yeah. The illiterate are represented by the incoherent.
theory meets the real world.
A few things.
The poll is not done to inform anyone about reality, it is for the media to see how well their various economic propaganda efforts are doing.
This is an assumption that he gleaned from that poll by running it through his own reality view. If it was true then Congress would have easily passed higher taxes and confiscated actual wealth from the wealthy, who are not the same as the Democrats “rich”. Congress would be quaking in their little marching shoes from not doing what such a substantial majority wanted done.
Or I can just assert that he is lying and knows it.
If Pew was really interested in studying “Economic Mobility” they would start from the foundation of research that shows how this works like the piece that was in a previous post today.
Age, martial status, education, desire to work. Those are the things that matter. They could use the poll to track those things and to educate people about how they are very determinative of where on the income scale you will fall. But that would not help the great overarching progressive/socialist cause so they just feed more dis/misinformation into the toxic brew they have already created.
More media shitheads spewing forth the crap.
– Look at the bright side. Any moment now tit’s McCain will throw her under-wire support behind Romney….
tit’s mccain done did dat
– You weren’t REALLY going to est 99 taco’s were you?
– It’s been 24 hours. You have to assume she’s forgotten.
speaking of mittens
Link
Many of those who are angry at government and identify politically with the left aren’t angry because they reject capitalism (those who do are a loud, drum-circling minority).
Not even. The drum-circling minority doesn’t give a fuck about socialism, they just want to bang on their drum all day.
And I sympathize. I don’t want to work, either.
The drummers themselves are just another basically non-political minority faction, like many others. As I have been pointing out from the beginning and is now being exposed from within to the media, many of these people are homeless vagrants. That’s another faction of this movement – a not inconsiderable one, considering they’re all pluralities – they want a fucking sandwich and a place to sleep without being hastled by the government (by which they mean, mainly cops and/or people who own things they’re sleeping on).
Some of these people may indeed even be open to crossing over. Some libertarian types who are already on the right side have been going to things things and trying to get in on OWS (god knows why, personally).
But for a lot of these retards, ain’t no way in hell you’ll ever get them to read Mises. It would confuse and anger them if they tried.
And the homeless people, they’re sandwich whores. Sheep. Ain’t no way to lead them but in a herd – the defining characteristic is they don’t lead themselves anywhere, they lay in the gutter. Hell, 90% of them are diagnosably crazy, not of sound mine. You can’t give a crazy person informed rational viewpoints, it’s definitionally opposed.
Before Reagan ended forced commitments for mental health evaluations unless they’ve hurt somebody, these people would have been thrown in a psych ward and drugged up, but now they’re homeless and scamming college kids for sandwiches, drugging themselves up, and fighting the government that is making people haft’n to be uproared when they’re sleeping on the floor in a subway.
I’m honestly not sure which is better for them.
I don’t know if there’s a single defining characteristic of the entire movement, apart from being chalk-full of hillarious epic fail.
…anti-government sentiment may be a product of ineffective government…
I agree they are misrepresenting the issue, I would go further and state that they are doing so quite consciously so as to avoid some rather pesky truths.
There is much consternation on the left over the inability of government to achieve the transformations they seek to accomplish. Hell, many are flat pissed off that two years of total government domination cannot even get the ball rolling in the ‘proper’ direction.
Goldberg touched on this repeatedly in his book (as have many other in their own efforts) and it often manifests as a desire for a ‘wartime’ approach to implementing the progressive agenda (cf. ‘never let a crisis go to waste’) and is ultimately nothing less than a pure expression of the fascist impulse at their very core.
While they somehow think they can avoid admitting the painful truths unmasked by the current state of affairs on the left, what they really fail to recognize is that, while obvious, it was also entirely inevitable based upon the very foundations of their approach to politics and society.
If the millions of corpses that accompanied last century’s various attempts at perfecting collective society don’t sufficiently illustrate the point, I can’t imagine what will. Aside from a fresh new pile, that is.
Hmmph. These LeftLibProggs of OWS and of the ‘Community Organized’ strain of parasites are desirous of as much Government as they can grow and ferment, because they want to be given and handed as much as it takes for them to ‘get through’ life with as little expended effort and work as possible. Cocooned and spooned, pampered and spoiled: there’s nothing more they desire that they earn themselves.
What we’re battling are Democrats who’ve moved far-Left; our battles are again battles against Communism, that platform we’ve battled before; this time, unfortunately, Communism is winning, because it’s taken half of our political establishment.
We should bang a shoe or something; we are losing this one.
‘can take’ is better I think. Or less alcohol. )
“I simply do not know how we can bring that about realistically.”
BBH,
If SCOTUS doesn’t sink Obamacare their just might be enough (34) States willing to press for a Constitutional Convention. Once one is called any number of amendments can be offered, but an amendment would need 39 states to approve it. I think we could get individual mandates outlawed, put a crimp on the commerce clause and maybe undo kelo this way.
A link for Pablo’s quote.
I think a lot or people’s anti-government sentiment could be better described as “Just leave me alone”. Seems like every government level, local,state,and federal wants to meddle more and more in every aspect of our lives. When all is said and done it all comes down to power and control.
38.
Or 43, if you’re Barack Obama.
WTfricketyF? Wpg 9 – Phi 8. Game played without goaltenders, it looks like. Musta been an experiment by agreement.
Why would you think that your version of what needs to be redone in the constitution would be what survived a constitutional amendment? That’s just as naively arrogant as the folks on the left who assume that when the great and wonderful Obammy state of Utopia is upon us, they are in the clover and not the shit.
I’m leery of any constitutional convention that can be demagogued ) and hijacked by the MBM and the left. As long as they hold the megaphone (the press), this is a bad idea.
There’s nothing Obammy and his followers want more than to have the slate wiped clean (and with us initiating it and acquiescing – talk about legitimizing their concerns) to fix the problems the dead old guys set down on parchment which is really old and stuff. Gotta modernize ya know. Get the POMO crowd involved and we are in for the rule of man and the codification of all their processes to keep the levers of power. Take the worse impulses of those on campus (they would be putting forth this new constitution – as they are already the go to guys for credentialed, stamped with the awesome moral, scientific and social authority by the media) and apply it nationwide.
NO thanks. I’ll settle for working within the framework of what is already there. I’ll not hand them the knife to gut our country.
“I’ll not hand them the knife to gut our country.”
that’s arnold palmer right there
“America has to wake up to this new reality: the Cold War battle between communism and capitalism is back, only this time it’s on our front porch. It went underground in the 70s, got an education, put on a suit, bought a house and had a couple of kids. Then it used the schools to educate new foot soldiers and manipulated the pop culture to indoctrinate the next generation of fellow travelers who seek to create a new world order in the image of old world Marxism.”
That is true.
It also makes you sound like a raving anachronistic madman straight out of a Kubrick film.
And that is the bitch of it. Doublespeak is real. They are socialists plainly, cultural marxists in fact, but if you call them that, they whine bloody murder, and you look like a raving loon and get marginalized.
Amen.
Rife with Risk
Oh, so that’s their theme song!
They are fascists, unrepentant and utterly unashamed. They would hang us all for daring the thought that we’re sovereign individuals.
I’m frankly sick of it all. I don’t even want to argue with them anymore — I know what they want, and I know they will not rest until they have it. Until every person who dares to be of the hated groups is spending their days in penury while paying for the leisurely lives of the nomenklatura, they will press farther and farther and farther.
You know Obama issued a signing statement refusing to accept that Congress didn’t fund his czars? This wasn’t a disagreement over the bounds of war powers, like the signing statements the left went berserk over during Bush’s tenure — this was a flat-out declaration that Obama does not recognize that Congress holds the budgetary power.
Where is our Rubicon? How far is too far? Will we simply bow and scrape to our new owners and accept our fate?
I’ll refrain from stating what I think should be done to the press. Calling them herd animals insults herd animals. Dante would have had to insert a new circle to hold them.
McGehee, exactly.
Except for those who have other ideas. Linked from geoffb’s link: The first excursion out of Occupy Oakland – An Anticapitalist March
If you’re not paying attention, this would be a damned good time to start.
No, they’ll eat each other eventually. And if they get hungry for me or mine, the appetizer will be 00 buckshot.
– They need confrontation, the whole circus was losing steam fast and petering out. The Eastern/Northern groups were already dwindling, even before the onset of winter.
– Plus if they don’t show some tangible progress they’ll lose what support they have, and the press won’t be able to prop them up, so desperation will probably drive them to go too far.
Ronald Reagan Speech – 1964 Republican National Convention
Fabulous last strike comeback Cards. Now finish.
Point of order!
What the Sam Hill does MT mean in the context of Twitter? I keep seeing it where RT should be!
If the millions of corpses that accompanied last century’s various attempts at perfecting collective society don’t sufficiently illustrate the point, I can’t imagine what will.
Reavers are what did it for me.
Sometimes it’s possible to get the sense that piling up corpses is the point.
piling up corpses is the point.
Deciding who lives and who dies on a super-industrial scale has to be tremendously heady stuff, which is exactly what psychopaths crave.
I know I get kinda dizzy when I RoundUp the weeds mid-spring. Maybe it’s like that.
Modified tweet, di. A retweet, but not exactly.
That piling up corpses thing works a whole lot better with an unarmed populace. And if they think they’ll be pulling the levers of government to accomplish that, I suspect their perception of the military is clouded by this nitwit.
I expect that they won’t be able to swing a dead comrade without hitting a rude awakening.
Thanks, Pablo. I was going to chalk it up to something inane such as replacing URL with URI, which always looks like the moron who designed the GUI forgot to capitalize the L.
In other news, an enormous flock of pelicans, or a flock of enormous pelicans.
Bird more appropriate to the moment.
Re: weather. SW Michigan first frost tonight. low of 30 or high 20s.
Cardinals nice all winter long. Very pretty against the white snow.
e responded with noise and wild gestures barely visible through the slit windows of the north facing cells. Someone made an announcement about the ongoing hunger strike of over 12,000 prisoners taking place in California prisons and that some of their demands consist of better living conditions, medical care, and an end to solitary confinement.
Ugh. I’m reading “Unbroken” and I’m thinking if we adopted some of the attitude the Japanese had toward the POWS…
I wish liberals who had so much sympathy would have even a passing acquaintance with the crime and blight and damage the criminals create.
You’d think that Oaklanders would have already figured that out. I’d like to propose a solution: Occupy Everything can have Oakland and everything in it, as long as we can fence the whole mess in. There they can build their communal Utopia.
I’m honestly just so sick of crime and blight in the cities. It just fucking sucks. Detroit criminals are now driving to where I live (Lapeer)to steal cars from dealerships. They ask to test drive, and then call racism when the salesman asks for a license, etc. They drive the car, and copy the key.
Come back later and steal the car. 7 cars in the last week.
And a business guy my husband deals with had his Humvee stolen. He tracked it in an unmarked car with a police bud. Found it w/in a half hour. Car in back, a bunch of “youths” playing basketball out front, who swarmed the car and told them to leave. Luckily, he was packing They got the car back when a few more cops showed up to help.
But, it was like a party atmosphere. Criminals control the city. They have no morals, no sense, and no compassion for anyone. they don’t go to jail unless they actually kill someone. We’re screwed.
Wait, strike that. They control the neighborhoods, not the cities. IT sucks.
[…] read the rest of it. We can only hope the mewling twerp he’s responding to actually sees it. Don’t miss this one, as well, wherein Jeff creates more chew-toys of two other liberal […]
That video almost made me do my Tippi Hedren imitation.
Almost.
If it makes you feel any better, Carin, our benevolent overlords in Washington are working overtime to make sure that the rest of the nation follows Detroit’s lead. You’ll soon be in good company!
No, that doesn’t help.
Breaking news? Perhaps around here it is: George Will column on Mitt Romney: ‘Has conservatism come so far … for THIS?’
Sneak peek:
Is the Establishment waking up and smelling the coffee?
Chipping your linked article Pablo:
But but but there is no establishment!
So, NYC is expecting 2-4 inches of snow over the next couple of days…and the NYFD just pulled all the Owwies’ generators. Heh.
Shoulda put up solar panels, Bitches!
Around my house, the phrasing is, “You’re not helping, Squid.”
I looked in on OWSExposed yesterday morning and found it a useful aggregator site for news pieces from across the country dealing with criminal and otherwise noxious behavior conducted by the Owwies. It’s interesting the Owwies or their allies see it as such a threat.
…a recidivist reviser of his principles…
That’s the most diplomatic version of “two-faced lying weasel” I think I’ve ever read. Might have to remember that one.
proggs are unhappy with the hermanator
Herman Cain Opposes All Federal Student Aid, Says It Should Be Left To The States
It’s not that the left is anti-government, they’re just anti-this-government. Government is just fine.
Link
Baseball Crank on the tweeter thingy: “You have to get pretty far into the Book of Revelations to find George Will typing a word in ALL CAPS.”
All hail His Inevitableness, Mitzi Romneycare, savior of all things Established!
The phrase “most electable” ought to be nominated for a prize in the category “The phrase most mendaciously propagandistic”.
I find it tedious that people who know better still pretend to act surprised when the Left acts like the Left, as if our disappointment, disapproval, or disgust matters to them a whit. You can’t shame the shameless.
There goes Cain again, being all reasonable and stuff.
81 for 74
Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the tea party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming.
That sure explains Jen Rubin’s RomneyLove.
“people support jobs creation policies but see govt failing to enact them,”
No shit? Gov’t can’t create jobs, except for monopolisitic gov’t mandated jobs, the logical extention of which would mean that the gov’t owns everything = “the means of production”. That is, the means of a necessarily decreasing rate of production, as the Teat progressively dries up.
So, yes, I’m among the “94%” of people in the Pew chart who believe either that the gov’t is not helping “people like them”, or perhaps that it’s on a course to not only not help them, but send them to extinction via the Communist Utopia. Actually, that would remove 100%.
But, hey, fortunately I just happen to have an idea that might help bring us conservatives closer to the OWS mob, using it’s own solution of choice to whatever it thinks is the problem with the Gov’t. Let’s, er, “trash” it!
BTW, I don’t want the government “helping” me. That is not its function. I want it to stay the frak out of my way.
I am not anti-government. In fact, I love our American constitutional republic. It ain’t perfect, but it’s the best ever conceived, and I’m anti-fundamentally transforming it.
Let’s not wear the label the proggs have assigned us, please.
I don’t think I did. In fact, I clarified that we are anti-Big Government, or anti-Leviathan.
That’s not the same thing.
Maybe we could harpoon Leviathan with some SquidCo pitchforks? Jeff is right, Leviathan needs to be put down, not the entirety of all Government – we are a representative republic that is watching the “representative” part geting chewed away…
Oh, I wasn’t really speaking specifically to anyone, just pointing out the progg attempt to label us as something we aren’t. It’s like saying we aren’t patriotic if we don’t approve of Obama’s agenda, or we want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I’m not anti-choice, I’m pro-life. I’m not anti-government, I’m pro-constitutionally limited government.
I think it’s a distinction we should make in every instance it comes up.
“Leviathan needs to be put down”
What are you doing with that gun, Travis…?