Friday Homestead Dispatch

A friend of mine posted this short diatribe written by someone else on Facebook recently. I don’t confront people on social media, friend nor foe, to counter-argue as most often what I say will not matter, and what people choose to believe is usually steadfast.

Here is the post followed by a meme:

Too often, we’re encouraged to blame successful people for the challenges we face.

But your financial future is shaped far more by your skills, discipline, decisions, relationships, and opportunities than by someone else’s bank account.

Wealth isn’t a fixed pie. When entrepreneurs build products people value, create businesses, and employ others, they can generate new wealth rather than simply taking it from someone else.

Instead of asking, “How do we make successful people have less?” a better question is, “How do we remove barriers so more people can succeed?”

Freedom creates opportunity. Envy creates division. Choose the path that helps everyone rise.

First of all, “Lisa Simpson” never “said” this in any Simpsons episode. It’s a fabricated meme.

Many people’s beef with the billionaire class are about the unfair tax cuts and rates between the super-yacht set and the K-Mart crowd.

Senator Chris Murphy said a couple years ago “The apex of Republicans’ plan to turn over our government to their wealthy cronies is a giant tax cut for billionaires and corporations. And they plan to pay for it with cuts to programs that working people rely on. Popular and necessary programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, are all being targeted.

The whole game for Republicans is taking your money and giving it to the wealthiest corporations and billionaires — even if it means kicking your parents out of a nursing home or turning off Medicaid for the poorest children. They know what they are doing is deeply unpopular. They are offering a tax cut to the most wealthy that is 850 times larger than what they are offering working people.

Oh and by the way, any tax cuts for working people are going to be washed out by higher costs for basic necessities, like health care and food. It’s a fundamental injustice.”

But, the bigger picture of this Libertarian way of thinking is that we have conditioned the populace of the U.S. that consumerism and accumulation is the goal and the end-all of the American Way of Life. That we ALL can be ________aires someday and have all the advantages that we are tricked into believing the wealthy have. That it leads to happiness. That it will solve all problems.

I wrote about this a couple years ago, reposting Thom Hartmann’s take on libertarianism…Libertarianism is a poison that’s crept into our society on the backs of rightwing billionaires like the late Libertarian David Koch, who ran for Vice President in 1980 on a platform of shutting down every government agency except the military, courts, and police.

I also wrote that if you wanted to dig a bit deeper into the roots of the movement, wherein Ayn Rand was a major player and proponent, check this out. Three men in America today own more wealth than the entire bottom 50 percent of the country, a level of inequality never before seen in the modern developed world. If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get rightwing billionaires and their money out of politics, and rebuild our civic institutions.

Then, merely a year ago in March, I posted Timothy Snyder’s rebuttal regarding Jeff Bezos’ buzzwords used in the Washington Post’s new editorial line: “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”

He wrote, “Liberty” is self-contradictory as an editorial code. To use liberty as a demarcation of what is and what is not to be published shows a deep misunderstanding of what liberty means. Liberty is an open meadow, not a fence. An editor who believes in liberty helps writers to make their own arguments well, because their freedom has to do with them. Liberty has to mean that people have the right to say what they want, including (for example) that liberty doesn’t need to be qualified by the adjective “personal,” that liberty is an infinite concept and not one that can be listed as specific “liberties,” that the concept is in tension with the fiction of the “free market”, or that the word is being put to pernicious, Orwellian purposes by American libertarian billionaires.

The language of “free markets” is authoritarian. Freedom belongs only to people. It does not belong to institutions or abstractions -- and least of all to non-existent institutions or abstractions. The moment that we yield the word “free” to something besides a person, we are yielding our freedom. And we should be aware that others who abuse the word by taking it from us intend to oppress us. When we endorse the fiction of “free markets,” we are entering a story told by others than ourselves, in which we are the objects, the tools, the non-player characters. We are accepting that we people owe duties to those markets. By way of an unreal concept we pass into real submission. We are accepting that we have the duty to oppose “government intervention,” which is to say that we must oppose political actions that would help us to be more free: safety for workers, protection for consumers, insurance for banks, funding for schools, legality for unions, leave for parents, and all the rest. We must accept whatever the market brings us, to go wherever the billionaires take us, to surrender our words, our minds, ourselves.

Another argument against the libertarian line of thinking and the billionaire class. Isn’t it interesting that not a single country in the world is organized along libertarian lines? If it were so great why hasn’t it been tried on the scale of a modern nation-state, even a small one, anywhere in the world?

The Biden administration did it’s best to undo and reverse the damage the Reagan Revolution’s libertarian experiment has wrought:

— Historically low tax rates on corporations and billionaires
— An impoverished middle-class
— Devastated labor unions
— The highest rate of child poverty and maternal death in the developed world
— Millions without access to healthcare
— One in seven American children going to bed hungry
— Our schools, roads, bridges and rail systems in shambles, and
— The nation $34 trillion in debt

And for the last year and a half, 77 weeks to be exact, the *rump administration has succeeded in creating a fascist state tied to corporate oligarchy, creating a modern feudal state fueled by capitalism. It relies on authoritarian strongman tactics, white supremacist rhetoric, and nationalist propaganda to mobilize a loyal base while distracting from the real power structure.

Just this week ICE arrested/detained more than 10,000 people.

And in Houston, ICE killed a man who ‘was not their intended target.’

Attacks on democratic institutions, scapegoating of minorities, and the normalization of political violence mirror historical fascist movements, fostering a culture of fear and division that serves the ruling elite.

Which takes us back to the billionaire class and capitalism, which has concentrated extreme wealth and power into the hands of a small ruling class. Decades of deregulation, corporate consolidation, and tax policies favoring the rich have transformed the economy into one where billionaires function as feudal lords, controlling resources, industry, and even political decision-making. *rump’s policies, from corporate tax cuts to labor suppression, reinforce this structure, ensuring that wealth flows upward while the working class remains economically dependent and politically disenfranchised.

This corporate oligarchy thrives by using fascist aesthetics as a smokescreen, promoting nationalism and cultural resentment to divide the masses. By fueling racial and economic anxieties, it prevents collective action against the true source of inequality: an economic system designed to keep power consolidated at the top. The result is a society where democracy is hollowed out, social mobility is crushed, and economic elites wield unchecked control—a system where capitalism no longer fosters competition but instead entrenches a permanent hierarchy, indistinguishable from feudal rule.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
— Humpty Dumpty to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1872)

And now…