Cogs

…the campaign is really a choice between two starkly different philosophies. One could be summed up as: “We’re all in this together.” The other: “I’ve got mine.”

—Eugene Robinson

 saw Pulitzer-winning columnist Eugene Robinson on television this morning discussing his most recent column, “Romney and Ryan’s disdain for the working class.”

The column centers on the Romney campaign’s response to the “you didn’t build that” idea that President Obama is now famous for uttering:

…Romney has told campaign audiences variations of the following: “When a young person makes the honor roll, I know he took a school bus to get to the school, but I don’t give the bus driver credit for the honor roll.”

When he delivered that line in Manassas on Saturday with Ryan in tow, Romney drew wild applause. He went on to say that a person who gets a promotion and raise at work, and who commutes to the office by car, doesn’t owe anything to the clerk at the motor vehicles department who processes driver’s licenses.

What I hear Romney saying, and I suspect many others will also hear, is that the little people don’t contribute and don’t count.

Robinson rhetorically wondered whether any of Romney’s children ever rode the bus to school and he went on to describe the importance of good bus drivers in terms of their interaction with children and their “important role in ensuring a child’s physical and emotional well-being.” Then he wrote:

School bus drivers don’t make a lot of money. Nor, for that matter, do the clerks who help keep unqualified drivers and unsafe vehicles off the streets. But these workers are not mere cogs in a machine designed to service those who make more money. They are part of a community.

The same is true of teachers, police officers, firefighters and others whom Romney and Ryan dismiss as minions of “big government” rather than public servants.

Well, it is painfully obvious that community is a contemptible concept to today’s breed of high-profile Ayn Randish Republicans. Those who are wealthy, or those who are on their way, are the ones worth worrying about, and the rest of us should consider ourselves fortunate that these “job creators” bother to throw us a few crumbs in the form of often low-paying jobs with little or no benefits.

Many times I have heard grateful anti-big government crumb-eaters extol the virtues of the moneyed class by saying something like, “I have never got a job from a poor person.” So essentially these folks would rather think of themselves as wards of the wealthy than wards of an activist and effective government that seeks not to destroy capitalism but to regulate it such that it works for all people, for the entire community.

Although he now says he rejects Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Paul Ryan has as late as 2009 embraced her ideas, which Robinson says place “self-interest as the highest, noblest calling and equate capitalist success with moral virtue.” As for Romney, “While he has never pledged allegiance to the Cult of Rand, his view of society seems basically the same.”

Romney made much of his fortune by buying and selling businesses, always doing so with indifference to each transaction’s effect on the community. The principle involved in making these purchasing or selling decisions was not consideration of the flesh and blood cogs in any of the business machinery, but in the profits that could be reaped from such deals. Nothing could better illustrate Rand’s “virtue of selfishness” than that.

Ryan in denying his affection for Rand, says it’s because her ideas constitute “an atheist philosophy” that “reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview.”

If that is so, if reducing “reducing human interactions down to mere contracts” so appalls him, he should explain why he is willing to serve with a man whose fortune was made by doing just that.

Posted by R. Duane Graham on August 14, 2012

https://duanegraham.wordpress.com/2012/08/14/cogs/