To wit:
Make no mistake: Michele Bachmann is a howling loon — a woman with no compunction at all about lying through her not inconsiderable teeth about virtually everything — but Ryan, no matter what his reputation elsewhere as a "serious" economic thinker, is no less radical, if somewhat less nutty. Where Bachmann has her devotion to the Constitution written by the voices in her head, Ryan has his economic "roadmap," a Randian fever dream he produced a while back that so alarmed his fellow Republicans that they ran away as though Ryan had proposed the Affordable Cholera Act of 2009. ... The rest of his rebuttal was a masterpiece of Dystopia Porn.‘Nough said. Read the entire Esquire editorial here.
Clearly, neither Ryan nor Bachmann has the foggiest notion of the role that the government of the United States of America — and the spending of public coin — played in making this country the world-historic power that you can read about in books. Ryan because his ideology won't allow him to acknowledge such things, and Bachmann because she's several bricks shy of a load.
But no matter how many times they mangle the story, our primacy in the world wasn't brought to you solely by the miracle of the unfettered marketplace, nor by a thousand points of light or by fairy dust sprinkled down by the benevolent rich. Rather, it was brought to you by risk takers who presumed to do big things partnered with a government that saw the wisdom of investing in said big things. And in small things, too. Like people. And these investments created the largest economic engine in history: the American middle class. Ignorance of this fact makes it no less a fact. Just because the Ryan-Bachmann axis seems utterly oblivious of basic American economic history will not change this fact.
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