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I don’t think much of the concept of Fairness. I always cringe when I hear the left call for the rich to “pay their fair share.” There is no such thing as “fair.” There never has been, and there never will be. Life is not fair in any way that has meaning.
There is no such thing as a Level Playing Field. There never has been, and there never will be. You can go all the way back to Hammurabi’s stele, and there has never been a level economic playing field. Governments make rules that govern commerce. And every rule ever written tilts the playing field in a certain direction.
The only economic question, really, is how we want the playing field tilted. That’s the only question.
And the answer to that question derives from what we want our society to look like.
I don’t want to live in a society with tent cities. I don’t want to live in a society where people are so accustomed to living in filth that they don’t even bother to brush the flies off their faces anymore. I don’t want to live in a society in which people have to choose between food and medicine, between their well-being and a third job to pay the rent. I don’t want Flint.
This is a rich country. And for the past 35 years, Americans have been working harder and longer, increasing economic productivity, and their wages haven’t reflected that. I have often heard it said that Reagan’s Trickle Down economics failed. It didn’t. It worked stunningly well. Wealth trickled down. And it geysered up.
In short, the bottom 90% has been busting their asses for the past 35 years, and their wealth has stagnated or declined against the cost of living while the rich have had their wealth boom. We are working harder, and they are reaping the increased wealth. Basically ALL of it.
Rich people should pay more because they don’t need that wealth, and millions of hard-working people do need it. That’s why. It isn’t a question of “fair share.” It’s a question of Quality of Life.
Stan Kroenke moved to LA to make another billion dollars. Why? Is that billion dollars going to improve the quality of his life? There is a point at which more money is meaningless except in terms of power and ego. There is a point at which you, your children, and grandchildren will never have to earn a dime for the rest of your lives without sacrificing a single luxury. In no way do I think it is moral for Kroenke or hundreds of other people to pursue wealth at the expense of other human beings’ happiness, security, and health just to feed their appetite for power and greed.
Furthermore, I have a great deal more respect for my garbage collector than I do for Stan Kroenke. My garbage collector gets up very early, in the dark of winter, in the rain and snow and freezing temperatures, or in the sweltering heat of mid-day, he drives to my house and takes all my crap away from my curb for me. They cannot pay that guy enough to do that work. Meanwhile, Stan can sit poolside in Monaco working on his tan and compile more wealth in a weekend than my garbage collector will in his lifetime. They designate it Unearned Income for a reason.
And I think that people who slaughter pigs, and sort recycling, and flip burgers, and clean up high school bathrooms where teenagers shit on the floor just to be rude…I think those are hard-working human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and receive decent pay for what they do, or to be compensated in services like health care and education and affordable housing and safe nearby parks. There is enough wealth in this country to make that happen WITHOUT stealing away from the quality of life of the fortunate people who make their way into the blessed 1%.
So, fuck it. Raise their taxes. I don’t give a shit if it is “fair” or not.
Yeah. To the degree that election fraud actually happens…it isn’t voters stuffing the ballot box. It’s managers screwing voters out of the right to vote.
But, you know, say “Voter fraud” enough times accompanied by mental images of darkies, and your work is done.
I don’t know what “Death of the GOP” means. The GOP has morphed. But none of those people within the party are having a “Saul on his way to Damascus” moment of conversion to some different set of ideals. What we have is Fruit Basket Upset, not Death. All those forces are going to jockey around over the next couple of election cycles, but they are going to recongeal in some form unless one of the factions splits off to form a third party – and my wager there would be on the Tea Party people because they’re arrogant enough to think they can get their way simply by refusing to compromise on anything, and insisting on it. But I bet that split doesn’t happen. I bet, instead, Paul Ryan, or someone like him, comes out of the 2020 primary, and this year gets written off as an aberration. And while part of me hopes I am wrong about that, I’m afraid the alternative is worse.
One reason I think the GOP isn’t dying is that the Trump Phenomenon is not happening down ticket. All of the congressional seats and governorships are being waged by the usual establishment types of people. For the GOP to really be imperiled, it would have to facing mini-Donalds running for mayor all the way up to the US Senate, but that isn’t happening. It is only the head position that is in disarray. It is business as usual everywhere else. So the Death of the GOP stuff is your standard, lazy media coverage of a horse race, and just another manifestation of humans’ silly egocentrism that imagines that whatever they are experiencing is what everybody else is experiencing. But what is happening in the presidential race is not happening elsewhere.
Yet.
It could be that in 2018, we will see a bunch of Trumps running. In fact, it would surprise me if we don’t. I think a lot of potential candidates are going to copycat Trump’s style next time around, and then we can begin to see what is happening. But my guess is the GOP revolution is just starting rather than peaking at a Crisis Moment from which pieces are going to fall immediately.
That this disarray is well-deserved is what makes it so sweet. When Gingrich first stepped into congress in 1978, he brought with him a bold plan to break the perpetual minority status of Republicans in the house, and it worked. The plan was to hammer away at the theme of a corrupt, over-sized government establishment. Reagan famously got on board with that plan, and the refrain that government was the problem became a truism in American culture, leading to Gingrich’s sweeping revolution in ’94. And they became the Party of Blame. Blame all problems on somebody else. Blame Democrats, blame government, blame minorities, blame victims. Blame Muslims. Blame, blame, blame.
The problem is that the Republicans are now the establishment having dominated the political landscape in varying degrees for the past 35 years, even with a couple of nominal Democrats in the White House. And conditions for working people have worsened. So when you constantly complain that government is the problem, and you are the government, eventually you get the Tea Party and Donald Trump.
Their strategy is now coming back to eat them, but it is far from clear how much damage this attitude which THEY cultivated is going to damage them. Unfortunately, I think it is wishful thinking to foresee the death of the GOP. The conditions suggest to me that the far more likely outcome is increased demand for authoritarianism to cut through the “inefficient, corrupt government.” People are prepared for a house-cleaning. And if you get Donalds running up and down the ticket, it will certainly lead to the death of the GOP, but what replaces it may be far, far worse. The endemic racism, and fear, and economic uncertainty that muddle our culture combined with the rise of the authoritarian nationalism Trump champions suggests to me that the phoenix rising from the Republican party looks an awful lot like this one:
So when you wish for the Death of the GOP, give some thought to what you think is likely to emerge in its place.
“Three football owners walk into a bar. ..”
