Republicans at Work: "A 'teacher' told my child in class that dolphins were mammals and not fish!" a third complains. "And the same thing about whales! We need TRADITIONAL VALUES in all areas of education. If it swims in the water, it is a FISH. Period! End of Story.
National Republican Party Website voter feedback, quoted by the Washington Post.
May 27, 2010
"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,' " Paul said. "I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business."
Rand Paul, criticizing the Obama Administration for being "too tough" on BP, Washington Post.
Is the right to own property the "most basic right" of any democracy, as some Tea Party leaders insist? Could something like that be any more true than, say, that the right to be paid a just wage is "the most basic right" of any democracy?
Maybe. Maybe not. But the first question that comes to mind is, what is property?
Original sin? Marxism as an economic philosophy may be dead, but a lot of Marx's observations about the nature of work and property still seem acute. In a nutshell, the real value of "property" comes primarily from the labour invested in it. So the thing of real value is not a thing, but the work of our hands.
So if someone has a lot of property and they want to protect their right to that property, the first question is, what right does the person have to that property. Most likely -- this sounds glib, but it's probably true-- it was stolen in the first place. From neighbors. From neighboring tribes. From the people living above the oil deposit. From the native peoples who hadn't developed a culture of putting "no trespassing" signs and fences around their property. Property comes from the exploitation of natural resources, forests, fish, water-- how does anyone obtain the sacred right to take exclusive possession of a tree?
Since property has no value in and of itself, when someone says they want to guard the right to private property, they are really talking about monopoly. It's nobody's "private" property-- it's always public. What I want to be sacred is my fence around it.
This is not to say I am against the general arrangement of things we have worked out in modern capitalism. Our system works pretty well as a way of distributing real wealth (the product of labour). It's the perversion of this system -- the tax breaks, monopolies, lax regulation-- that make the system unfair.
All corporations claim to love competition but no corporation really wants it, and only the government has the power to ensure that there is competition, and the idiots who think the government should stay out of the marketplace actually seem to believe we would be treated better by McDonald's, BP, Exxon, Monsanto, Archer-Daniels-Midland, and General Foods than we would be by Nancy Pelosi.
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