People who refuse to think for themselves and worship heroes like Bush OR OBAMA are not half as intelligent as they would like to believe. So, if I were you, I would not call other people idiots.
Calling someone an idiot is not an argument. Calling someone an idiot has never persuaded anyone to change their mind.
Imagine a society that is, yes, capitalist, and in which, yes, there are rich and poor, but in which the difference in the take-home pay of a person who is "poor" and one who is "rich" is much lower than it is in our country today.
Children from poor families would have almost as good an opportunity to educate themselves, to be productive, perhaps even innovative or creative, as children from rich families. There would be fewer people without healthcare and, therefore more healthy people. The rich would not fear that the envious poor will rise up and destroy or take what the rich have. The poor would not fear for their futures. The poor would know that they will always have a place to sleep, even if it is not a palace, The poor will not have to worry where the money for next week's groceries will come from.
All of us, rich and poor, would be less angry. The murder rate would decline. People would be more likely to cooperate and work together. Our entire society would be more harmonious. This is the way American pioneers lived in their communities in the Midwest.
We do not have to become a socialist state to move toward a society of the kind that I describe. We can achieve a much healthier society for our children and for ourselves if we simply work toward a just tax system that requires those who benefit the most from the opportunities our society provides to bear ab equitableshare of the burden of the cost of making sure our society is more harmonious.
Many of the greatest discoverers and inventors did not become multi-billionaires from their inventions: Think of Einstein's discovery of relativity, Tesla's inventions concerning electricity, and Salk's work on a polio vaccine. These men might have liked to be rich, but that was not their primary motivation.
This morning, I was thinking how very sad it is that so many Americans have been seduced by the ideology of the sociopathic Ayn Rand. How can anyone follow the social philosophy of a person who was so inept, so unsuccessful in managing her own personal life? She was one very sick chick.
Her own husband was no hero, certainly not a titan of industry or business like the characters in her novels. In fact, this bio makes him sound like a bit of a loser when it came to earning a living:
4.2 Was Rand married? Who was her husband?
Rand married actor Charles Francis (Frank) O'Connor on April 15, 1929, having first met him when they both worked in Cecil B. DeMille's movie The King of Kings in 1926. O'Connor was born on September 22, 1897, in Lorain, Ohio. They remained married until his death on November 9, 1979. Although O'Connor was an actor when he and Rand met, he did progressively less acting work throughout the 1930s, and was unemployed for much of the Great Depression. Over the course of his life he dabbled in various jobs, including running the couple's California ranch (when they lived there) and designing floral arrangements. Later in life he was an amateur painter. His painting "Man Also Rises" has appeared as the cover art for The Fountainhead.<*> (Rand's husband should not be confused with the Irish writer known as "Frank O'Connor," whose real name was Michael Francis O'Donovan.)
http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/biofaq.html#Q4.2Her knowledge of real life, of raising children, of dealing with the reality that keeps humankind going was very limited in that
4.3 Did Rand have any children?
No. Barbara Branden described Rand's attitude towards having children thusly:
It was a responsibility that she was not interested in assuming. When she was writing Atlas
, she would sometimes say that she was "with book." The only children she wanted were her books.<*>
http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/biofaq.html#Q4.2
Rand's philosophy was fiction. I read nearly all of her books in college and was quite taken for a short time. Then I fell in love. It became obvious to me that her ideology does not really support human life. It never rises to a human level.
Obama is not a disciple of Rand from what I can tell, but the "compromise" on tax cuts is a page out of Ayn Rand's theology text.
If we want a society in which we can live together in peace, we have to reject the Rand philosophy, and that means rejecting any "compromise" that will increase the disparity between rich and poor. We cannot afford greater economic disparity. Detroit is already having to cut back on basic sanitary services to portions of the city. We cannot allow American towns and cities to become unlivable. Because state taxes are related to federal taxes in many states, this tax "compromise" will throw state budgets into even worse shape and prevent states from moving away from insolvency and into prosperity.
This "compromise" is a disaster for America and not just for the federal goverment.
Ed Schultz is right.
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