Thursday, September 2, 2010

The enchanted financial forest



It's incredible that we've become so gullible as to believe in fairy tales, isn't it? But that certainly seems to be the case. All too many of us ignore the abundant evidence from recent years and still buy in to right-wing fantasies.

Somehow, it's supposed to be "conservative" to benefit the wealthy, even at the expense of horrendous government debt. Explain that to me, if you can. I really don't get it.

And why, in a democracy, do so many ordinary, non-wealthy people go along with something this insane? (It's easy to see why the wealthy go for it. After all it's always easy to believe what you want to believe.)

I think it might be a yearning for an aristocracy. We Americans love our celebrities, and we seem to yearn for our own royalty. Maybe it's comforting to be the loyal servant of the high and mighty. I've never understood that feeling, but I know it exists, especially in times of stress.

I mean, you can't really believe that cutting taxes on the rich will cause all that wealth to trickle down to the rest of us, can you? Not after the last decade, surely. And it's not as though the super-rich were hurting during the Clinton years - or during the Reagan years, for that matter. Our economy did far better when there was less of an extreme between top and bottom.

I just don't understand it. It all seems so... dumb. I suppose it could be ignorance, rather than stupidity, though. And extreme gullibility. Well, that's why I'm a skeptic. I want evidence for my beliefs. You'd be surprised at how many people don't (or, perhaps, just don't understand what "evidence" really means).

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