The President spoke to calm the citizenry recently:<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
Sorry, did I say “calm the citizenry”? I meant to “rile those subjects receiving alms from his most beneficent largesse”.<\/p>\n
It would be a good exercise in imagination for those who receive these giveaways to think about what they would do if those benefits actually stopped. And I don’t mean “stopped” in the sense of “went on furlough for a couple weeks or months, only to come back with additional sugar to make up the shortfall.” I mean, what if the Tea Party people are right and this rate of expenditure is unsustainable and eventually the huckster’s constant motion machine falls to a pile of gears and pistons. Then what will they do? Get some sort of job even with their chronic back pain? Perhaps pick up some craft they can barter? Attend a church that can help out? Maybe cultivate some family relationships and bear some children so they have someone to take care of them in their old age?<\/p>\n
The rhetoricians–and I apologize to Cicero for calling them that–on one side of the debate seem to want to carve different channels for imaginations to run. Instead of self-reliance, some leaders preach that while some citizens don’t have it, someone (“the rich”) does have it, and someone must take it from the haves and give it to them. It’s a Mad Max mentality where the government is The Humungus, liberating gasoline for its followers. We don’t need deserts, leather, and collanders. We might already be there.<\/p>\n
(Video conveniently seen on Real Debate Wisconsin<\/a> as I was thinking about this post.)<\/p>\n UPDATE:<\/b><\/font> Thanks for the link<\/a>, Tam. Hey, VFTP readers, you can get the trade paperback version of my novel John Donnelly’s Gold<\/em><\/a>, which Roberta X. mentions here<\/a>, for 20% off today (Friday, July 15, 2011) by entering the secret code BIG305 at checkout.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The President spoke to calm the citizenry recently: Sorry, did I say “calm the citizenry”? I meant to “rile those subjects receiving alms from his most beneficent largesse”. It would be a good exercise in imagination for those who receive these giveaways to think about what they would do if those benefits actually stopped. And […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-federal-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9640"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9649,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9640\/revisions\/9649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}