After all, it's all about them.
Chomsky on empathy and the value of government, something that these ME-baggers are antagonistic to.
Also, notice that privatizing it undermines the danger, it’s kind of an ethic that has to be undermined, namely the idea that you care about somebody else. A public education system is based on the principle that you care whether the kid down the street gets an education. And [in the Conservatives' view] that’s got to be stopped. This is very much like what the workers in the mills in Lowell, Massachusetts were worrying about 150 years ago. They were trying to stop what they called the new spirit of the age: "Gain wealth, forgetting all but self." We want to stop that. That’s not what we’re like. We’re human beings. We care about other people. We want to do things together. We care about whether the kid down the street gets an education. We care about whether somebody else has a road, even if I don’t use it. We care about whether there is child slave labor in Thailand. We care about whether some elderly person gets food. That’s social security. We care whether somebody else gets food. There’s a huge effort to try to undermine all of that--to try to privatize aspirations so then you’re totally controlled. Privatize aspirations, you’re completely controlled. Private power goes its own way, everyone else has to subordinate themselves to it.
Also see Thomas Frank on Bill Moyers' Journal talk about how conservatives try to undermine government.
THOMAS FRANK: Think of all the crises and the disasters... what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.... the Madoff scandal on Wall Street....The Jack Abramoff scandal. The whole sordid career of Tom DeLay. All of these things ... that we're describing here are of a piece. And that they all flow from the same ideas. And those ideas are the sort of conservative attitude towards government. And conservative attitudes towards governance... [That] government is a perversion. And to believe that the federal government can be operated, you know, with all of its programs, can be operated well and do things that are good for the people, is, as you say, is a perversion.
And they look at someone like Barack Obama and it makes them seethe. Because that's, you know, that's what he's trying to do. What conservatism in this country is about is government failure. Conservatives talk about government failure all the time, constantly. And conservatives, when they're in power deliver government failure.... Not always from design, but often. The Department of Labor, for example, the conservatives when they in office, routinely stuff the Department of Labor full of ideological cranks. And people that don't believe in the mission.... the result is that... they don't enforce anything. Towards the very end of the Bush-era, the Department of Labor had been whittled down. It was a shell of its former self. And at the very end of the Bush Administration, one of the government accountability programs did a study of the Department of Labor. And, I'm smiling, because it's kind of amusing.... President Reagan... He hated the Federal workforce. And this is an article of faith among conservatives.
[The Pay Gap between employees working for the government and those in the private sector]... keeps the best and the brightest out of government service, unless you're really dedicated to a cause.
But let me go one step further with this, Bill. When I say this is done by design, I'm not exaggerating. And this is one of the more surprising things that I found when I was doing the research for "The Wrecking Crew," is that there's a whole conservative literature on why you want second-rate people in government, or third-rate.
I found an interview with the head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce from 1928, where he said-- this quote, it's mind-boggling to me. But he really said this. "The best public servant is the worst one." Okay? You want bad people in government. You want to deliberately staff government with second-rate people. Because if you have good people in government, government will work. And then the public will learn to trust government. And then they'll hand over more power to it.
And you don't want that, of course. Your Chamber of Commerce. And I thought, when I first read this, "That's a crazy idea. I can't believe that sentiment." And then I found it repeated again and again and again. Throughout the long history of the conservative movement. This is something they believe very deeply.
[Conservatives see the world through one lens:]That the market is the, you know, is the universal principle of human civilization. And that government is a kind of interloper, if not a, you know, criminal gang. And getting in the way.
...Tom DeLay has said, in his newspaper column, and I'm paraphrasing here. The problem with conservatism isn't that it was tried and failed. It's that it never really got-- we never really tried it in the first place. So, what we have to do -- and I've heard, conservatives have said this. "What we have to do is go back and deregulate all the way. We have to, you know, slash government. We have to tear that thing down. That's what it's all about."
And the amazing thing about this. This allows them to represent themselves as dissidents against the sort of established order in Washington. Even though they ran the established order for years and years and years and years.