Saturday, March 10, 2012

A Teapublican's Paradise

This came across my feed this morning, and when something like this comes up, it's always worth a look-see. It posits itself as a response to God's Own Party, and with it, the Randian fantasies and Teabagging Rhetoric that seems to be tying together the Big White Tent of "boys-only" bootstraps and bigotry.

It even starts off with an awesome pitch, too:


Imagine, if you will, a country where there is:
No Obamacare
No Obama
The Fair Tax is the law of the land
The Income Tax code is simple and the forms are easy to fill out
The IRS is as toothless as a plate of Jello
There is a complete Laissez Faire free market
No Labor Unions
No Government involvement in Business, Health Care, Labor matters or pretty much anything else except national security.
So where is this mythical Tea-paradise?

Communist China.

The letter is written in open letter style to the Teabaggers and the Conservatives and the Libertarians. Just think for a minute - everything they're calling for exists in China, according to his letter (written by an ex-pat who lives there). The government doesn't involve itself in any business matters, there are no labor unions, and there isn't an Obama in power or a nationalized health care system. So really, it fits the mold perfectly for what the Teabaggers are screaming for.

I've been saying for years that calling China "communist" isn't correct. It's not just incorrect, it's flat wrong; China has what I can only describe as a totalitarian laissez-faire capitalist system. There is no state planning and the agencies run by the state (the coal mines, et al) have a horrible track record because there's no agencies to keep the authority honest. Privately run industries are even worse; we've all heard the stories of Nike exploiting slave labor in China; this is because there's no government regulation to protect the workers and their labor unions don't do much good. China is the picture of what the Republicans would have this country look like - they'd just change the names from "communist" to "capitalist" and call it a day.

Of course, the reason they'd end up creating a Chinese style system of government isn't out of any love for the way the Chinese do things. See, when people write things like this, they overlook (or, rather, don't bother looking at all because it wouldn't do any good and it's fun to write these kinds of responses) the fact that the only thing that the Teapublicans want is that uppity negro out of office, and for those noisy wimminz to stay shut up and barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen making them sammiches just like Moses' wife did in the 1950s on Leave it to Beaver, which actually happened, you know.

They don't care about the end results of anything that they're screaming about. They're perverse two-year-olds; stomping their feet on the ground and holding their breath until they turn blue in the face. They wan to have their way, and they've never had it any other way before. It's true that Obama is a danger to the country - but not for the reasons these clowns think. Any authority figure that's blindly followed is a danger to this country.

And that's actually what's at the crux of what's wrong with this country today: we forgot that authority serves us as the people; we as the people do not serve authority. If authority is unjust and immoral; if authority places the value of the few over the value of the many, then it becomes unlawful. We have a moral responsibility to defy unlawful authority. If it becomes clear authority is a threat to our rights as individuals - those hallowed rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights, or any other rights enshrined in the Constitutions around the world - then it becomes a responsibility to step up to the plate and tear that unjust authority down. This was the belief that Dr. King, Jr., held. It was relevant in the 1960s and it's even more relevant now, when people are blindly accepting any authority at all.

But anyway, yeah - the Teapublican paradise of Randian men and self-made Libertarianism is Communist China. Ultimately, this is because all unjust authority looks alike; the names change, but the means, the mechanism, and the methods, remain the same.

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