House of Eratosthenes

There is a campaign underway to associate the Tea Party with some kind of psychosis, to call the people caught supporting it crazy or nuts. You hear the term “crazy Tea Party rhetoric” often enough that, for me to go inserting links to buttress the observation, would be redundant, pointless, needlessly time-consuming and silly.

As I commented over at the Hello Kitty of blogging (I think you need a Hello-Kitty-of-blogging account to follow that link), I perceive the results of this campaign to be mixed. It is constantly moving along because it is constantly pushed, but it is building up no momentum because in their inner consciousness, I believe Americans hold an unshakable understanding that is contrary to this. There isn’t anything crazy or nuts about insisting your property is your property. It’s not crazy to say, if some jackass who wears a suit well and talks a mile a minute and manages to rake in a thousand more votes than his competition on election day, wants to achieve personal control over some vast mountain of loot, maybe the right thing for him to do is resign from his “public service” position and start a business. This isn’t nuts at all. And if people are constantly told that it is, even every single day, they aren’t going to sign onto that idea unless they wanted to sign on to it in the first place.

Now, this Dr. Helen post has about seven months of dust on it, and I assume by now she must have finished that book which I’m just getting around to ordering. But I’m much more interested in the study that says, when people are presented with an opportunity to destroy the wealth of others, not only are they inclined to go ahead but they are strongly motivated. They’ll pay for the privilege. See, this is why conservatives have a tendency to be religious and liberals are more inclined toward the secular. It all goes back to that damn apple. There is goodness; there are the base impulses that stir within us; these are two different things. Civilization must therefore entail some kind of restraint being placed on instincts from which we cannot separate ourselves, because they are part of us. We fell with Adam. In the world of liberalism, goodness is survival-of-the-fittest and hey, we must have it because we’re here. Every thing on earth your little heart desires is either a “civil right” that’s been legislated as one, or will be legislated as one someday soon. Which means individual effort is useless. It also means, every single act you can perform as an individual has been declared illegal already, or might very well be declared illegal soon. Irony: When every little thing is a “right,” nothing is.

A couple months ago Neal Boortz went to see Green Lantern and the story resonated with him. He likens the democrat party to Parallax, the cosmic being that thrives on yellow, fear-based, energy. Viewed through the lens of the “Tea Party is nuts” campaign, his corollary makes a lot of sense. One thing though: If you go see the movie, you’ll see the green will-based energy came first; there is an errant mindset emerging (spoiler?) that the green power rings are inadequate against the threat, and someone needs to build a yellow power ring and use it to do what the green power rings cannot do.

May I humbly suggest the exact opposite. We have these “un-Green-Lantern” people running around, un-policing the known universe exactly the same way the Green Lantern Corps police the universe. There are thousands of them, some paid by George Soros, others doing it for free, waving around their yellow power rings, getting the word out that it’s crazy and evil to want to hang on to your own property. Using fear to drive home the mantra that we’re all screwed unless we gather our possessions, put it in a great big pot, and let the wise elders exercise the control over it that we’re not good enough to exercise. In our real-life universe, it is the yellow, fear-based power-ring that exists already and is in fact everywhere and we’re seeing it in the mythology about the Tea Party patriots being mentally feeble and crazy.

The momentum is not being built, because green energy is present in all living things. Let’s forge the green power ring, and drive home the contrary message that makes sense:

It is freakin’ batshit-crazy to look at some guy who has a lot of money, and see a walking billfold. Or some kind of task that is left undone which, should that rich guy’s property be distributed — or destroyed! — has now been properly addressed and can be jotted down as a job well done. In brightest day in darkest night…channel the will. The green energy, which calls out crazy as crazy, and recognizes sanity as sanity. The study from ten years ago seems to indicate we all have this craziness. Well, if there’s one lesson to be learned from the Fall of Adam, it is that there is a meaningful difference between the impulses that are inextricably bound to our very being, and the desires that are to be channeled into a civilization destined to endure. Everything we feel, is not necessarily good. There has to be some restraint.

And the recognition of one’s own rights as an individual, is not where the restraint needs to be applied. The civilizing restraint has to be applied against the destructive impulses. That’s what we can learn from the study, that redistribution is really destruction. That is the innate desire. “Fairness” isn’t really the driving force. That’s really nothing more than a catch-phrase. The motivation is to destroy, and to destroy out of pure jealousy. It is crazy, it is nuts, and the time has come to start calling it out.

ONe question:

When you state, in essence, that the power to tax is the power to destroy, and that the government does not have the right to plunder the prosperous—- how do you answer those who retort that by living in this country, we have all de facto agreed to accept our taxation, no matter how heinous, as law of the land— that citizenship is consent?
- rhjunior | 08/31/2011 @ 21:09
I’d answer them in the way that makes the most sense: By requesting clarification about what exactly it is they are trying to assert.

If they’re trying to say it’s Congress’ business to figure out how to tax me, and it’s my place to butt out of the conversation, leave them alone to make up their minds, wait for the numbers to roll my way, open-wallet-shut-mouth — I would refer them to the “Consent of the Governed” passage in the Declaration of Independence.

If they’re trying to say I need to get my bags packed and get out if I think my taxes are too high, I would suggest they’ve missed the whole point. Or maybe I did? To me, the platform of the Tea Party is not quite so much that we’re entitled by divine right to fire-sale tax rates, and I don’t even see a crusade toward a more regressive tax scheme. The platform of TP is simply that our current trajectory is unsustainable — because 1) government simply cannot sustain spending of this magnitude and 2) nobody has incentive to support the status quo save for the takers, those who draw more from the government in benefits than they put in.

So to them I would say: Okay, if you’re going to insist on me becoming an expatriate, find & good, but you’ll have to issue the same ultimatum to everyone in the Tea Party, along with everyone else who makes an issue out of the long-term problems with the path the country’s on. Logically, if the day comes where you get your wish and there’s nobody left in the country except those who approve of the out-of-control nanny-state spending, on that day you’ll be left with nobody who can keep the engine going, just a bunch of takers and the whole thing will self-destruct.

Which, actually, has been backed up by history many times. As you’re probably aware, I’m typing these words from California, and our fair state is far from the only experiment that shows how this turns out. it’s the Maggie Thatcher thing: Eventually you run out of other people’s money. She’s right.
- mkfreeberg | 09/01/2011 @ 06:51

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Wednesday, August 31st, 2011