Who needs government at all in a system like ours? The universities, the corporate world, all our other institutions are fully in line with the popular memes so government is basically superfluous. Oh yes, it enacts "laws" that get enforced when they are in harmony with popular memes and ignored when not. Robert Reich in a Huffington Post piece: Why the Obama Tax Deal Confirms the Republican Worldview spells it out for us. Read on for the details.
The teachings of George Lakoff come into play here. The memes really have it. The republicans have done their homework and are a very clever lot it seems. They stage their public shenanigans and succeed in casting the left in the role of totalitarian mind controllers who will use "Big Government" to enslave us while they pull all the strings that are in that imaginary picture and still more. Here's Reich's take on it:
Apart from its extraordinary cost and regressive tilt, the tax deal negotiated between the president and the Republicans has another fatal flaw.
It confirms the Republican worldview.
Americans want to know what happened to the economy and how to fix it. At least Republicans have a story -- the same one they've been flogging for thirty years. The bad economy is big government's fault and the solution is to shrink government.
Here's the real story. For three decades, an increasing share of the benefits of economic growth have gone to the top 1 percent. Thirty years ago, the top got 9 percent of total income. Now they take in almost a quarter. Meanwhile, the earnings of the typical worker have barely budged.
The vast middle class no longer has the purchasing power to keep the economy going. (The rich spend a much lower portion of their incomes.) The crisis was averted before now only because middle-class families found ways to keep spending more than they took in -- by women going into paid work, by working longer hours, and finally by using their homes as collateral to borrow. But when the housing bubble burst, the game was up.
The solution is to reorganize the economy so the benefits of growth are more widely shared. Exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes, and apply payroll taxes to incomes over $250,000. Extend Medicare to all. Extend the Earned Income Tax Credit all the way up through families earning $50,000. Make higher education free to families that now can't afford it. Rehire teachers. Repair and rebuild our infrastructure. Create a new WPA to put the unemployed back to work.
Pay for this by raising marginal income taxes on millionaires (under Eisenhower, the highest marginal rate was 91 percent, and the economy flourished). A millionaire marginal tax of 70 percent would eliminate the nation's future budget deficit. In addition, impose a small tax on all financial transactions (even a tiny one -- one half of one percent -- would bring in $200 billion a year, enough to rehire every teacher who's been laid off as well as provide universal preschool for all toddlers). Promote unions for low-wage workers.
But here's the obstacle. As income and wealth have risen to the top, so has political power. Money is being used to bribe politicians and fill the airwaves with misleading ads that block all of this.
But the big question should be to explain why they take it. Why do the "electorate" put us in this situation? The answer seems simple to me. The republican/libertarian meme campaign has been almost totally successful. They have used fear and patronizing "protection" from the evils of wishy washy liberal Big Government and communism now replaced by terrorism to keep us in a state of eternal war and wartime austerity. If we are to have government this is its only legitimate purpose. As soon as it goes beyond these limits it runs up deficits and squanders our safety and well being.
I can't help but put some of the responsibility for this on the Democratic Party. They were warned; scholars and others told them to stop reinforcing the republican memes. Hand the country to them on a silver platter. Now we have a president who is one of them if he wants to be or not. maybe he too has been mesmerized by their memes?