Having gone to college at University of Virginia - a university where
prevalent ideology among students was conservative-libertarian - I
used to hear a lot about the supposed hypocrisy of liberals. On one
hand they spoke of liberal people who make little money as bums; on
the other hand they spoke of liberal people who made lots of money as
"limousine liberals."

Let's examine the concept of "limousine liberal." When a right-winger
looks at a liberal person who has succeeded in market economy, he sees
a hypocrite. When I look at a liberal person who has succeeded in
market economy, I see a hero: Someone who has made it in an economy
dominated by people who do not share his convictions - who do all they
can to undermine him - and who has still managed to hold true to the
goodness inside him and the ideology of compassion, wisdom, goodwill
and caring. I see someone who has stood in the face of those who oppose
him and everything he stands for - who claim to derive their legitimacy
from fighting socialism and supposedly offering people way to riches
and say such things as "money talks, bullsh*t walks" - and has managed
to succeed anyway and has reached the position to spread his goodness
and charitability and magnanimity to those who would need it or put it
to good use. And rather than seeing his success as a hypocrisy, I see
it as heroism - as being able to stand up to the petty, cruel,
dishonest bastards who claim money as the only thing that matters -
until, thatis, someone who opposes their ideology makes money and beats
them at their own game. At which point they cry hypocrisy. The only
hypocrites are themselves.

I have had money at some parts of my life, and I did not have money at
others. In both cases I retained my belief in a free-market economy
with an appropriate government involvement. Never did I whine about
having to pay taxes, the way the morons in my university did - claiming
that having to surrender, by global standards, a miniscule portion of
one's income for tasks necessary to running a superpower, represents
socialism. To pay a 30-something percent tax, for the kind of military
that America has, for the kind of police force that America has, for
the kind of roads that America has, is quite a bargain. And those who
find it a burden are nothing but spoiled brats.

I continue. It has been fashionable among the World War II generation -
the generation regarded the greatest ever until it is pointed out that
they also fought the war for the other side - to refer to their
children as being spoiled, even while all evidence shows that they were
far from spoiled but rather reared in strict, authoritarian, violent
homes. The gen-Xers have picked up that moronic argument and have been
blaming all their problems on what they call "the 60s generation,"
without going to any lengths whatsoever to analyze the reasons those
people believed what they believed and acted the way they acted. Being
ignorant of the causes, they are bound to repeat the errors of their
grandparents. This is especially the case, because they were reared by
people who had reacted to the cruelty, authoritarianism and violence of
their parents by running laissez-faire households. Spoiled children?
The only spoiled children are gen-Xers themselves.

Well, perhaps not the only ones. The Republican brats who whine about
30% taxes - who want to "get the government off their backs" while
their states' farmers and oilmen receive giant taxpayer-paid subsidies
from the government - who think they are real men while being in fact
the wards of the state - who say "money talks, bullsh*t walks" until
it's a liberal person having the money - who whine about Waco and Ruby
Ridge while people in their communities are committing far greater
abuses of people's rights than American government has done to its
citizens for a long time - who want to take the power, at last, from a
government that practices checks-and-balances and makes it its mission
to defend people's rights and to give the power to inferior, cruel,
brutal, ignorant, oppressive neo-feudalistic communitarian usurpers -
are just as spoiled as gen-Xers and far more spoiled than the baby
boomers. Their cries of "socialism" or "statism" are laughable -
utterly laughable, and laughable still more to someone who actually has
experienced statism. Baby boomers weren't spoiled; gen-Xers were. And
like all spoiled brats, they make a mountain out of an anthill that is
American government's errors in Waco and Ruby Ridge and claim that they
are living in a totalitarian country, while they know nothing at all
about real totalitarianism and attack the greatest government in the
history of the world for the unspeakable sin of being imperfect.

Ilya Shambat.



--- UseNet To RIME Gateway {at} 2/16/05 1:24:20 PM ---