Sharp analysis here; an excerpt:
"Ever since formally democratic governments have replaced monarchies, one of the main rhetorical tricks of conservatives of various stripes--including what are called liberals in Europe and are now called Republicans in the US--has been to continually invoke the image of the free individual versus the authoritarian state. Freedom and state power, they say, grow in inverse proportion.
"In the impoverished condition of contemporary American political discourse, this antagonism takes an increasingly simplified and distorted form in conservative rhetoric: state power is defined as intervention into the economy, primarily through taxation. Thus, freedom is diminished whenever the government taxes individuals (or even corporations!) or attempts to regulate private industry.
"Meanwhile, as critics from Marx to Chomsky have pointed out, private power grows and concentrates in fewer hands. Global mega-corporations, which own or set the terms of business for most smaller corporations and businesses, increasingly control more aspects of life.
"Hard working individuals spend years working forty, fifty or more hours per week for companies that increasingly show little commitment to their employees. Private tyranny grows, unabated, while citizens and workers are instructed--by populist rhetoric fashioned by economic elites and their apologists--to fear public tyranny.
"And so it goes. In the final presidential debate last Wednesday, October 13, two former Skull and Bones members who had the same debate coach at Yale sought to distinguish themselves. Chicken Hawk, who was fattened on petroleum, tried to portray Hawk, fattened on ketchup, as a liberal--'a Massachusetts Senator!'--who seeks to replace individual freedom with government tutelage. In a move that would've made their debate professor proud, I'm sure, Chicken Hawk pulled out the old trick:
"'Let me talk to the workers. You've got more money in your pocket as a result of the tax relief we passed and he opposed. If you have a child, you got a $1,000 child credit. That's money in your pocket. It's your money. The way my opponent talks, he said, "We're going to spend the government's money." No, we're spending your money. And when you have more money in your pocket, you're able to better afford things you want.'
"Money in your pocket? Is the Bush campaign trying to buy the vote? Indeed, this is part of the plan, though it should be noted that most of the money received from tax cuts is actually a loan, financed through deficit spending and to be paid for in the future by us and our children ($200 billion of the 2003 deficit according to the Congressional Budget Office).
"Mostly this appeal of Bush, as with his conservative forbears, is rhetorical, meant to invoke the image of struggle between individual freedom and authoritarian government. It can't be exclusively an attempt to buy the vote any more than it can be simply an appeal to the principle that individuals should get to keep their hard-earned money, for these both contradict reality. For most workers, real (inflation adjusted) wages have been stagnating or declining over the last three decades.
"In 1972, the average hourly wage for US private sector, non-supervisory workers was, in 2003 dollars, $17.14. In 2003 it was $15.35, an 11% decrease over 30 years.[1] That's less money in your pocket.
"And the reduction in purchasing power of the average US worker has come not from an increase in the public power of the state, but from an increase in the private power of corporations and wealthy individuals. Corporations, their managers and major stockholders have become fantastically wealthy at the expense of their workers....
"The conservative position is only one view of the relationship between state and individual and, I might add, the view supported by nearly every person who benefits from the status quo. A more complex view of this relationship recognizes that gross economic inequalities, concentrations of power in private hands, pockets of extreme poverty, et cetera, are as potentially damaging to individual freedoms and a healthy democratic society as public tyranny."
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