The time has come for blue America to go Galt.…
The New York Times published a widely discussed article updating an argument that progressive bloggers noticed a very long time ago. It's now well-understood that blue states generally export money to the federal government; and red states generally import it.…
Progressives believe in the redistribution of wealth, so we're not usually too upset by this state of affairs. That’s what it means to be one country. E pluribus unum, and all that. We’re happy to help, because we think we’ve got a stake in making sure kids in rural Alabama get educations and seniors in Arizona get healthcare. What’s good for them is good for all of us. We also like to think they’d help us out if our positions were reversed. It’s an investment in making America stronger, and we feel fine about that.
But maybe it's time to admit that we're being played for chumps, and that there are people in the rest of the country who are taking way too much advantage of our good nature. After all: it's now a stone fact that the blue states and cities are the country's real wealth creators. That's why we pay more taxes, and are able to send that money to the red states in the first place. We're working our butts off, being economically productive, going to college, raising good kids, supporting reality-based schools, keeping our marriages together, tending to our busy and diverse cities, and generally Playing By The Rules. And the fates have smiled on us in rough proportion to the degree that we’ve invested in our own common good.
So we've got every right to get good and angry about the fact that, by and large, the people who are getting our money are so damned ungrateful -- not to mention so ridiculously eager to spend it on stuff we don't approve of. We didn't ship them our hard-earned tax dollars to see them squandered on worse-than-useless abstinence-only education, textbooks that teach creationism, crisis-pregnancy misinformation centers, subsidies for GMO crops and oil companies, and so on. And we sure as hell didn't expect to be rewarded for our productivity and generosity with a rising tide of spittle-flecked insanity about how we’re just a bunch of immoral, godless, drug-soaked, sex-crazed, evil America-hating traitors who can’t wait to hand the country over to the Islamists and the Communists.…
By way of a modest proposal, I hereby declare the birth of a new Progressive Objectivism — a frankly producerist personal-responsibility crusade aimed at getting these whiny red leeches off our collective blue hide. If they think they can get by without us, let’s not stand in their way. What these people need from us, at minimum, is some tough talk — the kind of stern, grown-up verbal whoop-ass the conservatives wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to unload on us if the roles were reversed.
The time has come for blue America to go Galt. Our farewell rant — long and epic, as Rand's turgid writing style would have required — might sound a bit like this:….
AlterNet
Ayn Rand Worshippers Must Face Facts: Blue States Are Providers, Red States Are ParasitesSara Robinson | AlterNet
3 comments:
Hilarious stuff. Ted Cruz and his Kochs would wet themselves.
What's great about humor is people feel free enough to expose their normative assumptions and then poke fun at how ridiculous they are. On it's face it pokes fun at the red state's old rhetorical bluster but then it also exposes how the blue state's own values and cultural totems are just as flawed and ridiculous as the conservatives they are criticizing. That is what makes it so much fun for me, at least. Intentional or otherwise, amusing stuff.
That way of thinking is lateral to what is happening in EU. It is the way to split the country.
WHat is described is a fact but the proposed way to use it in fight is to go really bad and toward the new civil war or the split of USA peacfully at best.
That realisation of abuse by deficit states is what started the EU on the disintegration path.
Punish deficit states leads to suffering not only deficit southern states but also the decline of surplus states.
Just as generational solidarity of present employees giving to retierd population and unemployed provides the demand for jobs and keeps employed employed, it is the surplus states giving to deficit states provides demand to those surplus states and both sides are better off.
These fiscal transfers are something that keeps us together if used as a weapon it will become what divide us untill the logical resolution and resolution of country. Another option to choose in USA's decline.
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