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The Tea Partiers are high on this idea that the country consists of "water carriers" and "water drinkers" and that society is essentially zero-sum, with crackin
by michaelochurch 15y ago
The Tea Partiers are high on this idea that the country consists of "water carriers" and "water drinkers" and that society is essentially zero-sum, with cracking down on the "water drinkers" being the only solution to society's problems.
Pincus's bullshit "meritocracy" justification is eerily similar. He's trying to deprive people of equity now that it's worth something, and when people point out that this is scummy, he points his finger and whines, "but they aren't pulling their weight!"
That's the similarity I was trying to point out, though maybe I justified it poorly in the grandparent post.
- protomyth 15y agoWow, whatever you are watching or reading doesn't even come close. No one in the Tea Party I've met believes it is a zero-sum game. Quite the opposite (heck, farmers can show the counter examples). The Tea Party believes the government is wasteful with its spending and is more into power grabs then helping people. The only cracking down wanted is on government foolishness and waste. Helping people is a deep belief out here in the heartland.
- potatolicious 15y agoIt's not really that simple, though I agree the Tea Party has nothing to do with this. The problem with the Tea Party is pretty much identical to the problem with the Occupy movement - it's ill-defined. The purists would claim that Tea Party is about small government, like the Occupy movement purist would claim that it's about restoring bank regulation. But at this point both movements, being more or less leaderless, have grown wildly beyond the confines of the people that started it. Like #Occupy, the Tea Party IMO has become an easy label and an easy rallying cry for whatever ails you. What started as a movement for small government has also attracted economic reformers, people who don't like taxes, freedom of speech activists, McCarthyan anti-communists, social darwinists, and yes, plenty of racists too who just aren't very happy about that black guy. Go look at what people are carrying and yelling at Tea Party rallies, and you'll see plenty of all of the above. Similarly, go look at an Occupy rally and you'd have trouble telling what they stand for, even approximately. We have economic reformists, anarchists, environmentalists, black bloc hooligans, people who want to lynch all bankers, anti-corporate types, militant anti-corporate types... Some people want corporate power reigned in, an equally large contingent seem to just want the end of capitalism. Both movements are really just a sea of disparate interests groups trying to pretend they represent some kind of unified voice.
- tlear 15y agoTo be honest the only thing I could get from that piece of the post is that you hate Tea Party. Still confused as to how two are related. Pincus is a psychopath on that part we do agree.
- jerf 15y ago"The Tea Partiers are high on this idea that the country consists of "water carriers" and "water drinkers" and that society is essentially zero-sum, with cracking down on the "water drinkers" being the only solution to society's problems." You seem to have confused the Tea Party with the Occupy movement? I mean, both are sort of amorphous and all, but to the extent that they have a distinct identity from each other that would seem to be one of the core such differences, and that's where the Occupy movement shows up, not the Tea Party. It's basically a restatement of the 1%/99% motto.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- _delirium 15y agoIn that respect, the tea-party-affiliated "53%" movement has more or less the same structure, but disagrees over how to split the water carrier/drinker boundary.
- einhverfr 15y agoPersonally I prefer a division between "loaf-women," (hlaefdis -> lady) "loaf-guards," (hlaefwaerd -> lord) and "loaf-eaters" (no surviving descendant word). But then I always liked Anglo-Saxon literature. This being said, the problem with the tea party is not that they don't recognize some of the legitimate problems in this country, such as the very incestuous relationship the government has with big business (a relationship which lead Adam Smith in his day to advocate invisible hand policies), but rather the fact that they advocate those same invisible hand policies which resulted in such great concentration of wealth the last time around. BTW, concentration of wealth is a major issue, impacting everything from the living conditions of the lower class to national security, and the fact that the Western Roman Empire had so much more disparity of wealth than the Eastern Empire may have a lot to do with the fall of the Western Empire so much earlier. Because someone is going to rush to argue with me here, let me lay out Prof. Wolfram's argument on that. Basically he says that concentrated wealth necessarily leads to a narrow tax base because you can only raise sufficient money by taxing the super rich in a society with the concentration that existed say in the Western Empire. This means lower tax revenues, which erodes military spending. He points out that the Eastern Empire spent more on the military than the Western Empire raised in taxes. So when the Tea Party says we need to broaden the tax base, I fully agree. My only difference is that I'd note the only way to effectively do this is to address the issue of concentration of wealth.