Commentary By Ron Beasley�
Dennis G. at Balloon Juice has a must read post, Making money the Confederate way. There are to ways to create wealth - you can create it or you can steal it. There are those who say the Civil War was not about slavery and in a sense they are right.
150 years ago the Confederacy launched the Civil War to protect an economic systems based on the theft. Slavery was the most obvious example, but the system also exempted the rich from taxes and the burdens of war. It also refused to support innovation, invention or infrastructure as tools to generate wealth. It was a Kleptocracy.
One of the Confederacy�s biggest gripes against Lincoln was that Old Abe wanted to invest Federal money in Education, railroads, ports, and other physical improvements. Worst from their POV was that Lincoln also wanted to invest in people and protect the rights of workers. Lincoln�s desire to limit the amount of wealth the elites could steal was why the South started the war.
That brings us to to Paul Ryan's budget plan:
Case in point is Paul Ryan�s very �serious� wealth redistribution plan. At its core it is a plan to steal the labor, savings and wealth from most Americans and redistribute it to the elites. It is just another plan�in an endless series of plans�designed to steal money while passing along the cost of social and environmental destruction to others. It is just theft, plain and simple.
And like the Confederates of old, Ryan and his fellow eunuchs of the the elites are against any Federal involvement in wealth creation through innovation, invention or infrastructure spending. That might create new winners and losers and we can�t have that in their Galtian wonderland.
Ryan�s plan is distinctly Confederate, but then again that could be said about almost everything offered by the Republican controlled House. All of their policies are an effort to turn the clock back to some time before the Civil War and recreate a distinctly Confederate economy�an economy controlled by an elite handful of old white guys who could steal anything they wanted and below them a mass of poor folks struggling just to survive.
Thom Hartman has said that the goal of the Koch brothers and their Republican lawmakers is to turn the United States into Charles Dickens' England. I think Dennis G's analogy is better. As conservative Clive Crook points out Ryan's plan will do nothing to reduce medical costs and in fact will not even reduce the deficit problem. What it will do is to further redistribute the wealth to the elites at the expense of the middle class and the poor - the Confederate model.
Dennis G's post is one I wish I had written but I didn't so go read the entire thing here.
I thought his post was pretty disgusting, and I am disappointed that you would repeat it. Divisiveness is not a solution to this nation's problems.
ReplyDeleteActually, it was a brilliant post. Institutions all need to expand, and there are only two ways this happens, either through facilitating innovation (a leaner meaner way) or by subsuming the function of other vital institutions (fraud), in favor of it's own vested interests. The South was notoriously of the former, as it produced no invention of note in it's antebellum glory, while at the same time the North invented the steamboat, anesthesia, revolver, mass production, sewing machine, electric motor, screw propeller, vulcanizing rubber, and God only knows the cotton gin itself. All they had was stealing labor, just like this Ryan fool and his republican fantasists.
ReplyDeleteI admit that reading that post put me to mind of this post from the War Nerd.
ReplyDeletehttp://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-blog-day-14-four-blessed-years-without-dixie/
And I'm with him on the conclusion from Grant, right up the "but" in the last sentence.
�The South was more to be benefited by its defeat than the North. [The North] had the people, the institutions, and the territory to make a great and prosperous nation. [The South] was burdened with an institution abhorrent to all civilized people not brought up under it, and one which degraded labor, kept it in ignorance, and enervated the governing class. With the outside world at war with this institution, they could not have extended their territory. The labor of the country was not skilled, nor allowed to become so. The whites could not toil without becoming degraded, and those who did were denominated �poor white trash.� The system of labor would have soon exhausted the soil and left the people poor. The non-slaveholders would have left the country, and the small slaveholder must have sold out to his more fortunate neighbor. Soon the slaves would have outnumbered the masters, and, not being in sympathy with them, would have risen in their might and exterminated them. The war was expensive to the South as well as to the North, both in blood and treasure, but it was worth all it cost.�
Oh good. The divisiveness of anti-Islamic rants and all of the Christianist nonsense isn't enough, lets refight the Civil War. I've got a better idea, let's rename the country The Un-United States of America, or The Divided States of America. Let's pit as many people against each other as we can.
ReplyDeleteBill H
ReplyDeleteThe deep South never stopped fighting the Civil War.
Bill H. you're either a very nice, but naive man, or a disgusting concern troll. The South STARTED the Civil War with their decision to turn its back and secede from the union. Just like the current Confederate Party will shut down the government and blame it on the Democrats until they get EVERYTHING they want.
ReplyDeleteYour time would be way better spent arguing for compromise on wingnut blogs that champion the Confederate my way or the highway attitude, than here trying to stifle the rational human reaction to intransigence.
The south (small s) lost that war more than a century ago. There are far more constructive ways to argue the issues than ripping scabs off of old wounds and pitting regionial interests against each other. The economic issues are valid and I am more then willing to argue them, the language of "The Confederacy," an archaic symbol long dead, is not. It is simplistic as hell to say that the "south was an ecomomic system based on theft." What is our present economic system based on?
ReplyDelete