Keep Them Dreaming

“I wanna be a billionaire, so fucking bad…”
– Travie McCoy

“We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have nots; we must always be a nation of haves and soon to haves.”
– Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana

The American Dream. A nation of aspiring Donald Trump’s and Warren Buffet’s convinced just a small turn of fortune will bring their fortune. Our sense of morality and ethics is so perverted by the lure of economic prosperity we have gladly trampled the sanctity of everything in pursuit of dollar-gold fantasies. The Republican Party understands this pathology and has been masterful at exploiting it. Your vote is for sale and the price is but a dream.

The political machine that is the latest version of conservative ideology in America is selling lottery tickets again. The rhetoric of rich man, richer man flows effortlessly from the lips of its core believers. A set of policies founded around the notion that we must protect the well-to-do from the filthy claws of the unwashed masses spews forth nightly from our ever-present televisions. The Liberals want your meager allowance money to spread health and education and communication to all corners of the nation, how vile. The poor job-creating businessman peddling products we don’t need to cure ailments we don’t have cannot be bothered with a social conscience! He will flee the market, take his jobs to some sinister corner of the globe, and leave us languishing in a disastrous economic ruin. We must band together to protect the interests of the rich…but why?

“The dream of wealth is a foolish fantasy. Modern men should not aspire to accumulation for the sake of buying leisure. Our work determines our character.”

Because one day soon, you and I will be rich. Forget the pie-in-the-sky job creation sermon; we will need those protections from those other Not-So-Soon-To-Haves who desperately want their health and education and internet access freely handed over as if civilized society were really about raising the standard of living for all its members and not just celebrating the chosen few. We must protect capital investments from taxation because next week our calendar is chock full of meetings with tomorrow’s Steve Jobs begging for our gracious funding to launch the next big idea. If we’re burdened with a tax rate equal to that of…well today’s version of working-stiff you and I…we would take our billions and go…somewhere else.

So we must vote Republican. The Party of the Haves and Soon To Haves. Only they can keep those pesky foreigners at bay. Only they can cut taxes and the deficit simultaneously. Only they can protect the wanna-be billionaire dream for the next generation.

So never mind that the fourth largest expenditure of tax receipts is interest on the debt largely incurred to pay for the fifth largest expenditure of tax receipts – wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Never mind how are we going to pay for social security and healthcare, which accounts for the the top three expenditures. Tax cuts for the rich today are tax cuts for you tomorrow! Liberty is the freedom to be sick and ignorant and poor! Give me Liberty or give me Death?

The dream of wealth is a foolish fantasy. Modern men should not aspire to accumulation for the sake of buying leisure. Our work determines our character. Money made by moving money and hiding money and buying money is a threat to our national character, our manhood. Economic policies founded on the best interests of an economic elite is a folly. Casting a vote based on greedy aspirations is suicide. Jobs are not created by tax policies or interest rates or the absence of regulations. Jobs are created by the intelligence of men and women desirous to create tangible goods that improve the quality of our lives. We need to serve the Republican Party a severe wake-up call; their subservience to their rich masters is no longer tolerable. We demand a better party, better candidates, a better group of conservative leaders.