American Conservatives Have Become Too Antisocial To Hold Public Office
Here in Florida we are watching thousands of government employees, including a number of “conservative” elected Republicans, trying to justify retiring early to collect pensions, then keeping the jobs from which they have “retired” — at full salary while collecting full pensions. On the national stage, we see insurance companies competing fiercely for “Medigap” customers who, we all thought, were being taken care of by Medicare. But it turns out that there is plenty of profit in supplying them with drugs and services Medicare does not cover. And, of course, our “conservative” Republicans in Congress and the Oval Office have made sure their drug-producing friends aren’t forced to bid against one another for Medicare patients’ business, because that would be wrong. Or something. In the end, what we’re seeing behind the “conservative” mask is plain-out greed. And anyone who speaks out against greed is labeled a socialist. Fine with me. I’ve always been a social person. If that makes me a socialist, the people who believe greed is more important than helping their neighbors should be called “anti-socialists,” which is easily shortened to “antisocials.”
The Florida double-dip retirees justify their actions by saying they aren’t breaking any laws. And they aren’t. Antisocial Republicans have made this method of stealing from taxpayers entirely legal. They have also made it legal for business owners to treat working people horribly, for O.J. Simpson and other big-time criminals to shield their property from civil judgements, and to allow judges to rule on cases where litigants have donated massive sums to those judges’ election campaigns.
Now those same antisocials are working to cut Florida’s property taxes without replacing the lost revenue, even as they dip into state “trust funds” set aside for education and other specific purposes in order to balance our out-of-whack budget.
Oh, I forgot: Florida’s Republican-dominated legislature may consider higher sales taxes to replace revenue lost by lowering property taxes on Palm Beach mansions owned by the likes of Donald Trump, thereby easing the tax burden on our richest residents (both full-time and part-time) while raising the percentage of our state’s tax revenue that comes from our poorest people. Antisocial to the max!
Nationally, antisocial Republicans have rigged our income tax structure so that income from investments and inheritance is taxed at a lower rate than money earned from work. And whenever our country has any kind of fiscal problem, they cry for even lower taxes on our greediest, most antisocial citizens. The fact that working people’s incomes have barely gone up enough in the last 10 years to cover their higher health care expenses, while the greediest Americans have gotten far richer in the same decade, doesn’t seem to register with the antisocials.
Remember, too, that when antisocials talk about “excess government regulation of business,” they’re really saying laws against selling meat from sick cattle are wrong; that pollution is okay; minimum wage laws are bad; and that an unregulated credit and mortgage market is good for America.
That last one has turned out to be a sad joke lately, hasn’t it?
Oh, yeah: If you say anything bad about a government that glorifies the antisocials or advocate laws might rein in their power and ability to screw the rest of us however they want, you are now not only a socialist, but also guilty of class warfare.
Somehow I have trouble thinking of myself as evil because I want an essentially level economic playing field for all Americans, with simple, low-cost housing and medical assistance available to every citizen. Note that I’m not advocating gold-plated free housing or free, world-class medical care. I’m saying we can and should provide campground-level accomodations for people who either temporarly or permanently have trouble taking care of themselves, that if they want better housing than a free campground gives them they should work for it, and if they want medical care better than military sick call-style treatment they must pay for it themselves.
In the eyes of the antisocials, this is still socialism. And asking the antisocials to pay taxes in proportion to their wealth is class warfare.
So I’m a socialist class warrior. Which means that In China, a purportedly socialist nation, I would be railing against a government that has Mercedes-driving elites living in high-rises full of modern conveniences while peasants starve in its polluted countryside. In Cuba, I would like to see a popular revolution against the Castro-led government, whose high officials live in billionaire-level luxury while most citizens barely have food. Russia has a similar split, along with Mexico, Honduras, Venezuala, and a whole bunch of other Latin American countries.
All these nations are run by antisocials, even those whose ruling groups have the word “socialist” in their official titles. And those ruling groups are absolutely conservative in the sense that they do not want their systems to change. Robert Mugabe, whose policies have ruined Zimbabwe, is a staunch conservative in the sense that he is against political change. Ditto the Saudi royal family and North Korea’s Kim Jong-il.
Virtually all European dark ages monarchs were conservatives, too. And every single one of them claimed to be head of a “Christian Nation” and said he held power because God (or at least a Pope, supposedly representing God) had given it to him.
I remember crazed leftist groups in the late 60s arguing whether the Democratic Communists or the Communist Democrats were the “true” upholders of the revolutionary flag in America. Today’s “conservatives” seem to be in the middle of a similar fratricidal war, and are just as much on the fringes of society as the old commies. Their philosophy is just as discredited and unworkable as the Communist one, and is now being rejected by most Americans, even many who still have a nominal affiliation with the Republican Party.
A governing philosophy that primarily serves our greediest and most antisocial citizens, and expects all other Americans to be grateful for whatever crumbs “trickle down” to them from the hands of the wealthy, is a failed philosophy.
And when the antisocial philosophy’s own adherents cheat taxpayers by double-dipping, and say they’re doing no wrong because they aren’t breaking any laws, and are so bad at running our government that they hand off responsibility for many of its vital functions to profit-making businesses, it is time to throw the people who hold that philosophy out of office and try something different, no matter how loudly the antisocial conservatives yell that we are socialists or liberals or whatever other epithets they use to describe decent Americans who care about their neighbors’ well-being as much as they care about their own.