Excuse me while I infuriate some lurkers by quoting this annoyed response to a NYT piece on Tea Partiers:
Ok, we get the point. Anyone mad at government is just acting like a spoiled hypocrite, ignorantly decrying the very thing that makes life worth living. Tea Party people are ungrateful wretches who will someday regret the effects of their protests. In the same spirit, we can imagine what the New York Times would be writing in the 1850s, reporting on new political movements in slave states.
When the middle-aged slave Jim developed a boil on his foot after a long day in the fields, he went crawling to the plantation to get it treated and bandaged. The master gladly obliged. Today Jim expresses a rising interest in the new abolitionist movement and is even demanding what he calls his freedom. This new freedom would mean an end to the amenities that are a mainstay of his life. He depends of plantation-provided food, housing, and medical care, but his living quarters are filled with pamphlets by William Lloyd Garrison and others agitating for a “new liberty.”
I imagine that it is… frustrating to some, the way that opponents to ballooning government interference adamantly refuse to just shut up and go die in fires. The best ones are the ones that try to laugh it off…
It’s just the same “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” attitude. They don’t want to understand we’re making the connection from “assistance” to “control”, when they so coyly present it as just assistance. What’s her name fired from CNN had the same attitude last year in Chicago.
Susan Roesgen, that’s her. Of course I remember it after I post the comment…
This isn’t Jim not wanting to leave the plantation, this is Jim not wanting to go onto the plantation in the first place.
This is the plantation owner trying to entice Jim, saying “Come live over here, and I will take care of all your needs. You won’t have to make hard choices, and extend yourself, I can provide all. I can give you free medical, I can subsidize your housing, I can give you food stamps, all you have to do is give up some of that pesky liberty! Let me take care of you! Its for your own good. Think of the children!”
No thank you. I will keep my liberty, I will continue to take care of my family, and I will teach my children that they can do or become anything. I will allow the government, as my servant, to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare by encouraging a free market, and equal opportunity (not outcomes) for all.