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Honesty may be the best policy, but it’s important to remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.
- George Carlin
From time to time, I find myself fantasizing that I live in an America where reason and rationality rule. People make decisions based on facts and logic, not racism, hatred, and Fox News-inspired propaganda/talking points. People make informed decisions, and they discern lies and disinformation from abject reality. In short, it’s an America that no rational person would recognize.
For some time now, I’ve feared that America is destined to become something resembling the set from Idiocracy. While I’ve been worrying, it seems we’ve long since arrived at that destination. Watching Mitt Romney run a campaign built on a foundation of lies, disinformation, propaganda, and fear-mongering, it’s understandable how people like Ray Gaster see nothing amiss with broadcasting their racism and ignorance for the world to see. Gaster may be a successful businessman, and bully on him for that success, because it’s one of the things that makes America a better, more solid place. Gaster’s belief that he did it completely on his own is pure, unadulterated, self-congratulatory B.S. Without the stability and services provide by many levels of government, Gaster would be struggling to sell clubs to marauding bands of thugs and brigands.
At the risk of sounding like Elizabeth Warren, if you built a successful business, then congratulations. Your success wasn’t achieved in a vacuum, though. Government and the rule of law it maintains allowed you to build your business. It provides roads, standards, postal services, customs regulations, and many other services that create an air of certainty and consistency, which any business needs in order to survive. Ray Gaster no more created his business all by himself than houses build themselves. For him, and others like him, to claim otherwise only reveals the depth and breadth of their ignorance and racism.
If Gaster would choose to argue that point, there’s a very simple way to vet his argument. let him try to maintain his business without ANY of the guarantees and services government provides him. I’d submit that Gaster Lumber and Hardware would wither and die posthaste. And Ray Gaster would be revealed as the hateful, ill-informed ideologue he is.
Ignoring the way things are doesn’t validate your argument; it just proves that you’re a fool.
