Friday, October 29, 2004

Garrison Keeler Tax & Spend

www.NewRuskinCollege.com

Lecture Notes: 10-28-04

How do you sustain yourself?

What stories do they tell themselves? That’s what I want to know. How do they live with themselves?

Garrison Keeler, for example, at home with his young wife and child, in the kitchen, preparing the salad with the vinaigrette dressing, walnut oil, the shrimp sizzling on the fire, the wine breathing . . . what stories does he tell himself?

He likes to tell his audience, he positively gloats, that he is a “tax and spend liberal” and proud of it. This is the ‘I’m rich and can afford to pay the taxes,’ conceit. (Also Sean Hannity.) Yet, as we know, (see prior Lecture Notes), the rich, like Mr. Keeler, are not the ones who end up paying the majority of the taxes. By operation of the market all costs are redirected by market forces.

Keeler Enterprises periodically raises the fees it charges “member stations,” much of the cost being paid out of Federal subsidies, and Mr. Keeler’s bank account is replenished so that when next he goes to the market, and swipes his card, the connection is completed and he takes another feast home to his young wife.

How does he live with himself?

Answer: This is why he is a liberal.

His liberalism is a salve he applies to his guilty conscience as he slides into his seat next to his very young wife, the pasta steaming, the wine glowing in the crystal goblet.

That part of the cost of his banquet has been paid by forced payments from the poor, the bottom 75% is a fact that needn’t bother one, if one simply ignores it. Ignore also the regular price rises of Keeler Enterprises and PBS and NPR and all the price rises of all the members of the top 25%. Forget that these price rises take place against a global background of deflation, of twenty five cents an hour labor abroad, of workers literally chained to their work benches, and not just in Chinese prison factories, of illegal workers here in the USA, three million a year, working sub minimum wage for Marin Senators clearing brush, forget a world of six billion, forget all this and enjoy! Dinner is served.

This is how Garrison Keeler sustains himself. Ignorant of market operations all he knows is that his bank account pushes him ahead of need, and his “tax and spend liberalism” protects his ego, his vanity, his happy enjoyment of his young wife and her child.

Tell him that government money is being wasted he will roll his eyes under those bushy eyebrows confident that even if it was wasted, ‘What of it? It came from the rich! Me and my rich friends, why we pay the majority of the taxes!’ You see? Impenetrable.

It is a willful ignorance. And still, this is what sustains him. That the rich are merely the tax collectors of the system, that they manipulate the price mechanism to avoid taxes is, for Keeler, “only a theory” compared to the hard fact of “tax and spend liberalism.”

He prefers his lie to the truth because this is what allows him to enjoy his “rewards” in peace and comfort. This is the story he tells himself. This is how he sustains himself.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a conservative. I am not proposing socialism as an alternative. For one thing consider that the taxes collected by the rich are voluntary, for the most part. Keeler does receive some subsidies, but most rich people can only raise their prices if there are consumers who are willing to pay. The market system is one of mutual consent.

But if we could force “tax and spend liberals” to face the fact that their taxes are being redistributed by the market from those who can raise prices, people like Garrison Keeler, onto people with less ability to raise prices, for example, all those workers who must compete with the slave laborer and the illegal migrant, then these liberals might take more seriously our reports that the tax is being misspent.

Because of the complacency induced by the wine, and the “tax and spend liberal” ideology, it is difficult to redirect the attention of liberals onto what is actually being done. In Boston, New York, San Francisco, for example, three big liberal, Democrat controlled urban centers, zoning has been used by the Post Liberal elite, Mr. Keeler’s friends, to price housing out of the reach of the people.
(see paper no. 1948. Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability next link )
#1948. Edward L. Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko The Impact of Zoning on Housing Affordability
Yet because of the stories Mr. Keeler tells himself, and his audience, they are literally blind to the harm government is doing to the people. Because he tells himself as he munches on his shrimp and salad, that he wants to do good, he thinks that he actually is doing good. That his party is ruining the people, taking their meager wages from them, in taxes yes, and in prices and price increases to a greater extent, and then using the power of government to drive housing, education, medical care, etc. beyond the reach of the people, is quite literally lost on Keeler as he stretches on his couch for his nap.

Every dollar spent by government should be regarded as theft from the people. But I am a conservative not a libertarian. The charge of theft is a rebuttable presumption. For example when it was proposed that the Golden Gate Bridge should be built and that the power of the state should be used to raise the capital, (through government bonds), and competition from ferries limited, etc. the project, the proposed expenditure, might be justified if it were shown that the bridge would open up Marin County real estate thereby lowering the cost of real estate for the people of San Francisco.

And this is what the advocates of the Golden Gate Bridge propounded. The good of the people! Yet, see how the people were betrayed. No sooner had the people been conned out of their money than the rich people of San Francisco and Marin immediately set about separating the people from their bridge. Senators Boxer and Feinstein in Marin and San Francisco respectively were part of the process by which the elite down zoned both counties driving up the cost of housing and forcing the middle class and poor out, leaving the people’s bridge for the benefit of the rich.

(Shhhh! Don’t wake up Mr. Jones. He wouldn’t want to make any of these points. Let him sleep. The campaign will soon be over and he can go back to his “ethanol” plant. Boxer and Feinstein are big supporters of Mr. Jones’ “ethanol.” It is in fact a government monopoly. People would not voluntarily agree to buy Mr. Jones’ “ethanol” because of the laws of physics. (It takes more energy to make “ethanol” than it produces. It is a poor bargain where no one benefits. Well Mr. Jones benefits. Benefits as long as his “opponent” Boxer and the other Marin Senator Feinstein support the “ethanol” fraud.) Sleep Mr. Jones, sleep.)

This is the reality of the “tax and spend liberalism” which Mr. Keeler advocates. This is the dark truth he shields his guilty liberal conscience from. He knows that there is an “unfairness” in society but rather than investigate it he projects it onto the Republicans, who are the villains in the story he tells. That the “unfairness” might be more basic, that it might stem from his own perverse ideology can not be admitted by him on account of his desire for a sound nap.

Keeler has contacts at KQED and Marin, possibly with Yvonne herself. He has made many references over the years to my situation. (At one point I even considered if I was being targeted by old men with young wives: Keeler, Imus, MacLaughlin, Swanson . . . Then it came to me. I was only hearing from people who have radio microphones in front of them. And what kind of people have radio microphones? Self absorbed egotists, the kind of men who have second, third families, marrying younger and younger wives.)

What stories do the egomaniacal tell? Comforting stories. Stories full of kitsch. They are never responsible for the harm they see all around them. Imus was at first for the war but his ego found it more comfortable for him to now tell the story that he is against the war. MacLaughlin also has found more restful snoozes sustaining his ego with a new story line: such is the power of young wives.

For the longest time I could not understand O’Reilly’s lack of interest in the story of this website. Here was a chance to expose his competitors, Weiner, Imus, the whole NPR involvement, then too the chance to expose ABC, and thereby possibly push FOX into the top three, displacing ABC. A story of how powerful egotistical broadcast personalities used their power to destroy a man for no other reason than that they could. This was a story that FOX should have lusted after.

Then find out what is going on, I found out that in April, when I was protesting Imus, (see Imus Protests: April), O’Reilly was talking dirty to a girl.

Counselor: . . .

A woman. So what stories does O’Reilly tell himself. He used to bitterly complain about his Federal taxes. Now he can not beg Andrea enough to take $6 million off his hands? Instead of talking dirty to Andrea he could have been on the phone to me, developing a story about how a rival network set out to destroy me . . . could have pushed FOX into the forefront, a major story, and he is talking to Andrea, holding the phone in one hand and----

Counselor: . . .

And anyway what does he say to himself? How does he sustain himself? What stories does he tell? He could still have his $6 million; he could have helped FOX; could have done justice, why not? Bill, why? . . .

I don’t get it. And yet people will say O’Reilly he is a white male and I am a white male and add our incomes together to get the average white male income, like we are on the same team? Not only did he not take the story he has repeatedly expressed contempt for me. Argued against even general obvious points. (see Clones, 2nd edition) Same team? The rich white men even support quotas as another way to torment humanity. To hell with justice! Imus, Weiner, O’Reilly, stand for the platform of memememememe.

How do you all sustain yourselves? What stories do you tell yourselves?

I don’t understand you . . .

www.NewRuskinCollege.com

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