6/25/2010

Personal ResponsibiliTEA


..."Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs (TEA Partyers)—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?..."

Read My Country, Tis of Me at the Atlantic.

2 comments:

Roadkill said...

Citizen Paine,

Your cartoon reminds me of a video I saw back in the late stages of the Obama presidential campaign. Some woman named Peggy Joseph was talking about how things would change once He was elected. She said "I won’t have to worry about putting gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage"

As to the excerpt from The Atlantic, well and good, but don't mislead the few readers you have with the idea that some middle of the road Atlantic writer is concerned about the Tea Party. Kinsley is a typical lefty – ignorant of the people and ideas that make up the Tea Party, but afraid of it because it threatens their world view. So instead of trying to really understand the movement, its much easier to make up straw man objections and then cut them down. Pretty shallow analysis, but it certainly appeals to the devout left.

Lastly, about that moniker of yours: “Citizen Paine.” You might want to do a bit of research on what Tom Paine thought and wrote, because he was pretty much the antithesis of the collectivist thinking that you espouse.

One of my favorite Paine quotes is that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.”

No truer words were ever spoken by Citizen Thomas Paine.

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure Thomas Paine actually accomplished much in his life. He was able to whip up the masses by turning a mole hill into a mountain.

Anybody can kick a tiger in the nuts. Few can face the aftermath.