Ah, the arrogance of the Better Class.
Mar. 8th, 2009 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ebonlockIf you haven't read Hunter's post: If Only We Could Be So Lucky over at Daily Kos, you really should. A few highlights:
It is all so simple, really. You can see how the "achievers" are better than anyone else, and how put upon they are. We claim that the farmers of America create our food, but they are only the saps at the bottom of the chain -- food does not exist unless there is a global market to assign it value, then gather cash by making increasingly leveraged wagers on the incremental differences within submarkets of that global market. You may claim that our miners, those that willingly entomb themselves under a billion tons of rock in order to pry just a small amount of the raw materials of society out from under it, may create "things", for without them there would be precious few "things" to create -- but they are hicks, undeserving of such admiration, and certainly undeserving of official "Achiever" tax breaks. What do they know of danger, who have not had to rush to their computer to trade a several thousand shares bought earlier in the day, so as to gain a slight monetary advantage over the hundreds of thousands of people doing the same?
So yes, please, by all means, teach us a lesson, Achiever Class, and do it quick. You take your money, and we'll take the people who know how to fix your goddamn plumbing at three in the morning. You grab your portfolio and hold it high above your heads, a symbol of your lifetime of accomplishments, and we'll take all the firefighters. I can only presume you will not need our doctors, our schoolteachers, our grocers or even our tax accountants. Ayn Rand would have wanted it that way: Ayn Rand, oracle of the prickish class, official trumpet section for anyone and everyone that thinks themselves a king.
Really, read the whole thing, it's a thing of true beauty.
It is all so simple, really. You can see how the "achievers" are better than anyone else, and how put upon they are. We claim that the farmers of America create our food, but they are only the saps at the bottom of the chain -- food does not exist unless there is a global market to assign it value, then gather cash by making increasingly leveraged wagers on the incremental differences within submarkets of that global market. You may claim that our miners, those that willingly entomb themselves under a billion tons of rock in order to pry just a small amount of the raw materials of society out from under it, may create "things", for without them there would be precious few "things" to create -- but they are hicks, undeserving of such admiration, and certainly undeserving of official "Achiever" tax breaks. What do they know of danger, who have not had to rush to their computer to trade a several thousand shares bought earlier in the day, so as to gain a slight monetary advantage over the hundreds of thousands of people doing the same?
So yes, please, by all means, teach us a lesson, Achiever Class, and do it quick. You take your money, and we'll take the people who know how to fix your goddamn plumbing at three in the morning. You grab your portfolio and hold it high above your heads, a symbol of your lifetime of accomplishments, and we'll take all the firefighters. I can only presume you will not need our doctors, our schoolteachers, our grocers or even our tax accountants. Ayn Rand would have wanted it that way: Ayn Rand, oracle of the prickish class, official trumpet section for anyone and everyone that thinks themselves a king.
Really, read the whole thing, it's a thing of true beauty.
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Date: 2009-03-09 01:39 am (UTC)Speaking as a political pundit, I assure you that there is absolutely, positively, unequivocally nothing less necessary to the function of society or economy than a political pundit...so I don't know where these folks who want to go Galt think they're going. Then again, as long as they go...