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tea baggers avoiding this thread like the plague
http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/chapt...likes-the-idea
Sen. John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senate's Education Committee, introduced legislation that would require every Idaho high school student to read 'Atlas Shrugged' and pass an exam on the book to graduate.
tea party
Ayn Rand's Gospel of Selfishness and Billionaire Empowerment Is Plaguing America
Thirty years after her death, Ayn Rand’s philosophy of selfishness and billionaire empowerment rules the world. It’s a remarkable achievement for an ideology that was pushed to the fringes for most of her life, and ridiculed on national television in a notorious interview with Mike Wallace.
But, it’s happened. And today, the United States and other independent governments around the world are crumbling while Ayn Rand’s billionaires are taking over.
With each new so-called Free Trade agreement – especially the very secretive Trans Pacific Partnership, which has less to do with trade and more to do with a new law of global governance for transnational corporations – Ayn Rand’s reviled “state” (or what we would call our democracy, the United States of America) is losing its power to billionaires and transnational corporations.
Ayn Rand hated governments and democracy. She considered them systems of mob rule. She grew up in Russia, and as a child watched the Bolsheviks confiscate her father’s pharmacy during the Russian Revolution. Likely suffering from PTSD from that incident, Ayn Rand devoted her future writings to evil government, including the "evil" of its functions like taxation, regulation, and providing social services to the poor and sick.
She divided the world into makers and takers (or what she called “looters”).
On one side are the billionaires and the industrialists. People like Dagny Taggert, a railroad tycoon, and Hank Rearden, a steel magnate. Both were fictional characters in her book Atlas Shrugged, but both have real-world counterparts in the form of the Koch Brothers, the Waltons, and Sheldon Adelson. According to Rand, they are the “Atlases” holding up the world.
So, in Atlas Shrugged, when the billionaires, tired of paying taxes and complying with government regulation, go on strike, Ayn Rand writes that the American economy promptly collapsed.
On the other side are the “looters,” or everyone else who isn’t as rich or privileged, or who believed in a democratic government to provide basic services, empower labor unions, and regulate the economy. They are the leeches on society according to Rand (and according to Mitt Romney with his 47% comments). And, as she told Mike Wallace in in 1959, they do not even “deserve love.”
To our Founding Fathers, looking out for the general welfare of the population was an explicit role of the government, one of its most important and the reason this nation was created when we separated from Britain.
But to Ayn Rand, a government that taxed billionaires to help pay for healthcare and education for impoverished children was not just unwise economically, it was also immoral.
Nature abhors a vacuum – both in the wild and in politics. So, when people, organized in the form of a government, are removed from power, then money organized in the form of corporations and billionaires moves into the vacuum to take power – which is exactly what’s happening today, worldwide.
In the thirty years after her death, the United States crept closer and closer to Ayn Rand’s utopia. Reagan dramatically slashed taxes on the rich and went after labor unions. Clinton deregulated financial markets for the rich, ended welfare as we know it, and committed our nation to one globalist corporate free trade agreement after another.
And, under Bush and Obama, we’ve seen the rapid privatization of our commons, the further erosion of social safety nets, and more losses of national sovereignty with more so-called free trade agreements.
In Europe, we’re seeing sovereign governments neutered by Conservative technocrats. According to Ayn Rand, the rich can never be asked to sacrifice. So instead, it’s working people across the Eurozone who have to pay for the bad investments that the banksters made in the run-up to the global financial collapse.
As we saw in Greece in 2011 with the deposing of Prime Minister George Papandreou, and all across the state of Michigan over the last few years with financial managers laws, when democratic governments are unwilling to do the bidding of the rich, they're immediately replaced by corporate lackeys who will.
The Taggerts and the Reardens are holding the reins of government today.
Which explains why Corporate America paid an average tax rate of just 12% in 2011 – the lowest rate in 40 years. It explains why 400 billionaires in America now own more wealth than 150 million other Americans combined. And it explains why fewer impoverished Americans are getting less federal assistance than at any time in the last half-century.
Ayn Rand envisioned a world without governments – a world where the super-rich are free to do as they wish.
We tried that during the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th Century – before Ayn Rand was alive. If she'd watched the ruthlessness of the Robber Barons like she did the Bolsheviks, she may have reached different conclusions.
She may have realized that American Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower were right when they made sure that wealth was more evenly distributed and the Billionaire Class was held in check.
Or she may have come to understand that corporations and billionaires owe their wealth to the state and not the other way around. Without favorable patent and copyright laws, a court system, an educated workforce, and an infrastructure to move goods about the country, then no one would be able to get rich in America. We'd be like the Libertarian paradise of Somalia.
As Harry Moser, the founder of the Reshoring Initiative,argued [3] in The Economist, “Corporations are not created by the shareholders or the management. Rather they are created by the state. They are granted important privileges by the state (limited liability, eternal life, etc). They are granted these privileges because the state expects them to do something beneficial for the society that makes the grant. They may well provide benefits to other societies, but their main purpose is to provide benefits to the societies (not to the shareholders, not to management, but to the societies) that create them.”
Sadly, this understanding of how democratic republics work - and why - has been lost this generation.
And Ayn Rand’s disciples are making sure the next generation never finds it again.
Idaho State Senator John Goedde, who chairs that state Senate’s Education Committee, introduced a bill this week that would require all students to read Ayn Rand’s book “Atlas Shrugged” before they can graduate. Goedde explained that the book made his son a Republican and that it “certainly gives one a sense of personal responsibility.”
Between stupidity like this, and the re-birth of Ayn Rand through corporate-funded think tanks and Hollywood movies, the Billionaire Class wants to make sure the next generation buys into a toxic ideology that’s quite literally destroying the world as we know it.
They don’t want the 21st Century to be “America’s Century.” They want it to be the “Billionaire’s Century.” And if they succeed, then the middle class in America - and through most of the developed world - will go extinct.
http://www.alternet.org/economy/ayn-...ica?paging=off
That libertarians and Repugs adore, venerate Ayn Rand's adolescent, simplistic, sociopathic bull proves how intellectually, emotionally primitive, stunted they are.
lol Twilight for Tea Party
Ridiculous. Just like seat belt laws. Highly recommended does not need to be required.
Why does politics have to be us vs. them? I'm registered independent because the republican party is too far left for me but that doesn't mean we need to agree or defend what others do.
I think its also ridiculous that you have a call out for TP'ers to defend this action.
The with the country, after all, its just an us vs them game.
i think it's a good idea and a great stop gap to liberal tyranny Goedde you the man tbh
Like usual. DOK misses the point of a political movement that he knows nothing about.
I find it funnier how DOK never explains how to pay for all his favorite social policies. Like a kid telling their parents "Just go to bank and get money from them"
I think people avoid your post because you are an idiot
Comparing this to seat belt laws is asinine. Seat belt laws are there because of dumb s who don't wear a seatbelt but then expect taxpayers to finance their medical care when they get in a car accident. I'd rather just do away with seatbelt laws and let those poeple die off, but that'll never happen.
Point being, seat belt laws serve a tangible purpose, requiring students to read Ayn Rand books only serves the purpose of indoctrinating kids with right wing propoganda about faith based economics.
The guy proposing this even admitted to it. He flat out said, "Because it convinced my son to be a Republican" when he was asked what the motivation being the law was.
What social policies do you speak of exactly?
Also tell me more about how option trading is outlawed
But I thought you were for smaller government?
The part of the story that you didn't read because it wasn't what your professor told you, or wasn't in the le:
But it turns out Goedde doesn’t plan to pursue the legislation; he introduced it to make a point. The state senator told fellow Education Committee members the bill was introduced to send a message over recent Education Committee decisions he disagreed with.“It was a shot over the bow just to let them know that there’s another way to adopt high school graduation requirements,” he said, according to the Spokesman. “I don’t intend to schedule a hearing on it.”
Apparently Goedde was unhappy with the Idaho State Board of Education’s decision to repeal a rule requiring two online courses to graduate from high school, as well as its decision to retreat from another planned rule on principal evaluations.
Idiot
Good job deflecting from your failure in this post.What social policies do you speak of exactly?
Also tell me more about how option trading is outlawed
So this was a case of another tea bagger who didn't get what he wanted so he threw a temper tantrum about it and wasted the legislature's time to promote idealism rather than get stuff done?
Par for the course, tbh.
Good job explaining what these alleged policies I favor are
Or explaining where the you heard option trading was illegal
Par for the course on you being an idiot.
Good job reading an article before you post it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/05/op...bert.html?_r=0
“Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses,” makes a strong case that for a large portion of the nation’s seemingly successful undergraduates the years in college barely improve their skills in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing.Intellectual effort and academic rigor, in the minds of many of the nation’s college students, is becoming increasingly less important. According to the authors, Professors Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia: “Many students come to college not only poorly prepared by prior schooling for highly demanding academic tasks that ideally lie in front of them, but — more troubling still — they enter college with at udes, norms, values, and behaviors that are often at odds with academic commitment.”
It's like the author was writing about you
And you wonder why they'll put a veteran in charge of you
College improved my skills enough where I'll be starting a job before my 23rd birthday that pays over 50k. At that age, you were still in Iraq murdering babies
I'm still waiting to hear more about the policies I support and option trading being illegal.
Obese people are more of a burden then paraplegics.
How about a maximun 300 calorie purchase law?
That would be much more beneficial than the current seat belt laws.
I couldn't agree more
As long as we're gonna give free healthcare to obese people who chainsmoke, I'd restrict their eating in a lot of ways(however maximum 300 calories is a little overboard), like making it so food stamps can't be used to buy food that leads to type 2 beetus. And again, I'd much rather just let the obese people die off, but that'll never happen.
At 23 I was an electrician apprentice making more than that with no debt. I joined the Army because I wanted to. I didn't start killing Iraqis until 25. Good job running to the shock comment that shows you maturity level well below 22.College improved my skills enough where I'll be starting a job before my 23rd birthday that pays over 50k. At that age, you were still in Iraq murdering babies
I'm still waiting to hear more about the policies I support and option trading being illegal.
Why stop there? Lets outlaw sports. I shouldnt have to take on the buden of subsidizing the next lebron when he blows put his knee with no insurance.
I'm not deflecting a point I agree with, I'm laughing at the fact you think I'm an example of it. That article wasn't written about college kids like me, it was written about political science majors who pick a major "they find interesting!" that's completely useless in the real world. I'm also laughing at the fact you think I give a rat's ass about your assessment of my maturity level. The more people like you hate me, the better I feel about myself and my intelligence.At 23 I was an electrician apprentice making more than that with no debt. I joined the Army because I wanted to. I didn't start killing Iraqis until 25. Good job running to the shock comment that shows you maturity level well below 22.
It's too bad you didn't learn more about option trading in college, tbh.
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