I keep seeing this pic being passed around, most recently at Greg’s. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of power.
Text of left image (teacher at blackboard): Busting unions that provide teachers with middle class salaries, affordable benefits and job security. Not class warfare.
Text of right image (Romney giving speech): Asking people who make hundreds of millions of dollars in capital gains to pay more than 15% of their income in taxes. Class warfare.
Caption: WTF? Seriously, WTF?
Thing is, of course the top-down damage and theft isn’t warfare for them. It isn’t warfare until two sides are fighting. Until then, it’s just the ruling class going about their ruling, lah-dee-dah. Like the police, the violence they do with the power of government behind them isn’t assault or murder or theft. Just governance.
Remember that when they ask you to put them in power.
The ideology that drives conservative thinking assumes that relatively recent developments in social structure are inherent in the human condition. By this I namely mean relative equality and a fair distribution of wealth. They seem to assume that the “immutable laws of the market” drive us toward our modern condition. The historical truth that feudalism and despotism are the natural states of human society. If we allow them to follow their Laissez-faire ideology that is the state to which we will return.
I prefer “pillaging,” since as governance it’s rather poor.
Good governance seeks order and utility, not personal enrichment for the governors.
Isn’t that the point of the image, or more specifically, the WTF at the bottom? The right cries “class warfare!” when the rich are asked to pay more, but not when the middle class is squeezed.
[…] over at Almost Diamonds Stephanie Zvan talks about an image that’s making the rounds that she seems to think is really insightful and that I think really shows the flaw in this […]