"Taxpayer Money" Nonsense: Right Or Left, They're Confused About AIG

Whether coming from the right or from the left, from conservative talk radio or from liberal blogger land, you have heard some form of the following:

AIG has taken "taxpayer" money and given it away in ridiculous bonuses. Such avarice is unconscionable. American taxpayers have bailed out a company that deserved to fall into bankruptcy or receivership; this whole scandal is the rewarding of failure and incompetence. The American people now own 80 percent of AIG, and hence should be entitled to dictate how AIG is to spend taxpayers' hard-earned cash. America is sick of keeping such companies afloat, companies that flagrantly disregard the expectations of those who have come to their rescue.

With all due respect to the American "taxpayer," let me gently admit that I have never heard such abject lunacy. The whole world has indeed gone mad, losing both a sense of proportion and the rudiments of logic. Right-wing nutjobs believe that AIG should have just failed, that AIG had no right being bailed out by "taxpayers" in the first place. Left-wing moonbats rage at AIG's alleged greed and crass materialism, and denounce the distribution of "taxpayer" funds for unjustifiable compensation.

Please let me point out something so apparently ridiculous no one else is saying it: AIG -- and all its American employees -- are taxpayers! Over the years AIG has paid the US Treasury billions if not trillions of dollars in taxes; if anything, AIG, and companies like it, have been keeping the United States government afloat for decades. The common taxpayer, that man or woman who is not the owner of a massive Blue Chip company, is able to pay taxes to the Treasury -- the very taxes used to help struggling companies like AIG -- because he or she has earned money as an employee of a company like AIG: it's businesses that make taxation even possible. The American "taxpayer" is nowhere if someone is not generating wealth that creates the jobs that enable that "taxpayer" to pay taxes.

Moreover, AIG, being a taxpayer, also is a member of that taxpaying set that has paid for the bailout: AIG is also a shareholder in that "80 percent" of Americans who "own" AIG. In other words, AIG has bailed out itself, and it owns both public and private stock in its own company.

The shrill cry that AIG is somehow holding cash that is not its own but entirely someone else's is simply ludicrous. Yes, one can argue that AIG is holding some cash that belongs to the American people, but it is absurd to construe this bailout scenario as if AIG is neither a taxpayer nor essential to the viability of the Treasury and the American people. Lost, too, is the very real fact that Barack Obama is bailing out these companies in large part because he knows -- as all thinking Americans know -- that the government does not make wealth that is then returned in taxes: private business and industry provide the Capitol with capital, so to speak. All of Barack Obama's budgetary plans are contingent on thriving businesses: the bailouts are designed to stimulate the economy so the government can collect MORE revenue through taxes from businesses and employed citizens. This proves that economies and markets are not contingent on the state; the state is contingent on economies. The chicken and egg riddle is easily answered here: the state DOES NOT come first. Simple history proves this: the American government was not first established and then economies and wealth followed. The markets and economies of this continent were vibrant and potent, and hence provided the infrastructure upon which a government could be built. The American people, living freely, privately and in personal contract, produce the wealth of this country, the very wealth Washington seeks. Washington is the result and not the cause; Washington is the recipient and not the source of wealth.

So, in short, we have before us a strange, paradoxical riddle: AIG has bailed out itself. Thus, it should be allowed to do with its bonus money as it sees fit.

But listen to the Democrats rush toward punitive, confiscatory taxes to take back money they believe they "loaned." That rushing sound is the true sound of incompetence, failure -- and greed.

Amazing. And sick.

Peace through dissent.

[Addendum: It's time that the talking heads set, the talk radio set (including the "heavyweights" like El Rushmo), and the blogging set quit this insanity. (I have not heard Rush Limbaugh, Michael Graham, Jay Severin, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Greta Van Susteren, Laura Ingraham, or anyone else, get this right.) The common locutions, like "taxpayer money," "your hard-earned tax dollars" and "our money," need to stop. Such phrases and terms are fine for fomenting outrage and envy; they make for great radio ratings and political boilerplate. But they are intellectually embarrassing. Ayn Rand is screaming from her grave, and this despite the fact that she denied any afterlife. Seriously, this whole manufactured outrage over AIG is embarrassing enough to stir the atheistic dead.]



©2009/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

How Sad This Is Funny†

[Let me begin by begging forgiveness: I know this set-up is too long, but what the heck.]

Boston radio talk-show god Jay Severin often says that "liberals always lie to get elected, while conservatives can only tell the truth, which often costs them elections." Well, he may not say exactly that, but my paraphrase is quite close to the pure Severin doctrine. Liberals conceal their true intent; to be transparent is to doom themselves to unelectability. Conservatives, on the other hand, do NOT conceal: they tell you what they will do, and what they believe, and this openness often proves politically fatal.

Note, then, how Severin's words seem to ring true in this general election cycle. Barack Obama, the apparent Democratic front runner, is chided for not being specific; he's accused of being all form and no substance. Of course, if Severin is right, then Mr. Obama, a true liberal, MUST be evasive; he must be veneer and can never be solid redwood.

John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, at least gives the appearance of substance, despite how much his more conservative peers disagree that he is one whit candid. But one can hardly think of a less appearance-oriented candidate: image CAN NEVER be John McCain's campaign strength. Moreover, McCain has told America what he thinks -- substantively -- on many issues, and his opinions (and actions) have hurt him. But few would say that McCain is from east to west all veneer. I may be wrong, but I don't think either Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee has accused Mr. McCain of being all "hope" and no ideas, or all seduction but no commitment.

All this to say that perhaps Severin is right. Perhaps. But what this is really about is something James Taranto notes in yesterday's "Best of the Web": the media cannot tell the truth about Fidel Castro. At least here the Severin doctrine is found to be infallible and inerrant (nihil obstat!).

Check out item #4,"Who Was Fidel Castro?", at this link.

Rarely is something this sad so funny.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2008/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

†This first appeared at RedState.com on 2.20.08

Racist Facts: On The Dictionary Of Talk Radio

Hospitality is an inscrutable word. For if someone sends me an invitation to a party and then is rude to me at that party, even to the extent of ignoring me (this indeed has happened), I might begin to think my host invited me to submit to either his sadism or to my own self-abuse. I might even begin to think that hospitality was the sort of kindness that was meant to send me to the hospital, even the psychiatric hospital. I mean, I might think that a host is merely a person who takes another person hostage to inhospitality.

I have invited people here, to this rather sober salon, and I've tried to make them at the very least feel safe. Should a particularly petulant guest insult me to my face in the Comments section of each post, I have promised to treat that person with all due propriety. I am the host after all, and even if it means that as host I must endure my detractor's parasitic prose, so be it. It is what hospitality is all about: You shall be treated fairly, respectfully, and with grace.

But for the life of me I cannot figure out the hospitality of talk radio. Here one finds a host ostensibly inviting people to join him (or her) to "dialogue" and "debate in civil discourse", and yet at the slightest hint of a dialogue between interlocutors holding truly disparate views, the host usually turns dialogue to diatribe, with smatterings of abuse garnishing the canapés: the appetizers turn out, rather quickly, to be quite unappetizing and bitter. Oddly, people keep asking for more.

Last night was no exception as I listened to former Boston-based-now-nationally-syndicated master of soliloquy, Jay Severin, whose recent stint on MSNBC's The Situation with Tucker Carlson brought him some frequent TV face time. Mr. Severin received a call from a young man who took umbrage with Severin's observations around US immigration issues. Particularly, the young man averred that Severin's eloquent (he's always eloquent) litany of facts -- that the inner cities of America are rife with crime, illiteracy, poverty, and other such ills -- combined with the factual observation that such ills plague areas largely composed of minorities, amounted to racism. Moreover, the young man had the temerity to suggest that facts, in and of themselves, can be racist. Needless to say, the sharp-witted and sharp-tongued Severin scoffed at the idea that facts could be anything but coolly neutral, even value-less, devoid of any racial import or overtone. In his rebuttal, Severin cited dictionary entries of the word "racist"; his citations intimating that language was static––"racism" cannot mean anything but what the dictionary says it means (Severin forgets that dictionaries only list how words are used and not how they must be used). Severin also reminded listeners that he was of rather impressive intellectual stock, whereas his caller was not.

As Severin attempted to wrest the conversation toward something resembling a bad Socratic dialogue––where Severin would pose a question and yet would not restrain himself long enough to listen to his interlocutor's rather nuanced attempts to answer with some mindfulness of his own––Severin's scoffing only increased, even to the point where he was speaking over his guest's rather interesting and not at all antagonistic theory. And after the call was over and Severin returned from a commercial break to the blues music he allegedly adores, the scoffing could not be stopped, as he snidely suggested that he needed to be careful when he said that "blacks invented the blues," for such a statement of fact might be racist. Alas, I turned off the radio when Severin began his next segment with the proclamation that the argument facts can be racist is "the quintessence of the domestic threat to the United States Constitution that our Founding Fathers" were talking about.

Now quickly: Can a fact be racist? Well, what if I took five black men and five black women and put them in a cage (please, I am not advocating this), clinically observing them for 30 years, and then I published a factual article in a factual journal wherein I listed that the offspring of these black men and women tended toward incest, would that fact be racist? I think it would be. If I took a hundred thousand Jews and put them in a ghetto, let's say in Warsaw, and then I observed that the Jews seemed to be very shrewd at money-dealing on the black market and conniving in general, would that be a racist fact? I think it would be. What if I was a German scientist in 1944 and I observed that Jewish skin made for good soap, or effective lampshades? Would these not be "facts," and yet would they not also be "racist," making your very skin crawl?

I think they would.†

And what if I said that America's inner cities were rife with crime, with illegitimate children, absentee fathers, illiteracy and poverty everywhere, and that these things were mostly the plight of black families––would this, at least possibly, be the recitation of racist facts? Might not my litany of facts regarding the inner cities even begin to lead you to believe that blacks are lost, or incapable of saving themselves? Might my recitation of facts bias you against blacks; and might my recitation of facts also lead you to forget the broader causes of inner-city turmoil, perhaps even blinding you to the fact that inner-city blacks might in fact be living in a Warsaw ghetto, even a cage, surrounded by the barbed-wire of white institutional and political racism?

My broader point is that the caller to the Jay Severin radio program did something for me: he opened my mind to something I've never before seen or understood: statistics can not only lie, they may blind and mislead, and they may even fuel the very thing they were intended to suppress. Facts are not merely neutral, at least not always. When you hear the "facts" (from surveys) that the majority of Americans believed that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that most Americans who believed such an Iraq connection also watch Fox News, you are not entitled to believe that these are offered in cool detachment: these facts are meant to sway, intimidate, upbraid and even dehumanize. And if a person states that 40 million fetuses have been killed since Roe v. Wade became law, that person surely intends to sway you. In fact, people always use facts in order to sway you, perhaps often ignoring other, broader facts that might help you frame your thoughts more completely. "Facts" of this kind are not neutral, and you know it all too well: it is a fact that John Kerry "voted for the war before he voted against it"; it is a fact that George Bush "was only" in the Air National Guard in Texas. You get the idea.

And while the caller did something for me, he did nothing for Jay Severin, though I think had Mr. Severin actually been a proper, high-bred host (he is from a moneyed family); had Mr. Severin listened, he may have understood something very interesting and important: It is never too late to have one's mind opened; it is a good thing for even a host to learn something from his guests. But sadly the distance between hosting and hostility is not very great. Too bad Mr. Severin (and others of his medium) cannot keep the two words farther apart. But at least one is comforted knowing that Mr. Severin's dictionary is always nearby.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

†Let it be noted that I am even wary of fabricating facts for the sake of hypotheses or analogies. Even repeating news of an old crime might prompt a return to that sort of crime for some sick, imitative mind dwelling among us.