the 90 percent are NOT scum -- Margaritaville NFL Forum

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Date Posted: 18:13:45 02/03/14 Mon
Author: Comrade GG
Author Host/IP: 206.212.164.12
Subject: the 90 percent are NOT scum

emloyees. labor. workers. They are not pond scum.
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We all believe that some people are just more important than others, and for conservatives, no one is more important than business owners. Remember how gleeful they were when President Obama said �you didn�t build that� when discussing businesses during the 2012 campaign? Sure, he was taken out of context (he was talking about roads and bridges, not the businesses themselves), but Republicans genuinely believed they had found the silver bullet that would take him down. He had disrespected business owners! Surely all America would be enraged and cast him from office! They made it the theme of their convention. They printed banners. They wrote songs about it. And they were bewildered when it didn�t work.

Just like those members of Congress listening incredulously to Eric Cantor, they couldn�t grasp that the whole country didn�t share their moral hierarchy. After years of worrying primarily about the concerns of people who own businesses, they�ve elevated to gospel truth that the businessman�s virtue is unassailable, that his rewards are justly earned, and that no effort should be spared to remove all obstacles from his path. When it comes down to a choice between, say, a business owner who would like to pay his employees as little as possible and a group of employees who�d like to be paid more, conservatives don�t just see the choice as a simple one, they can�t imagine why anyone wouldn�t agree.
Truth is, a lot of Americans who have worked for small businesses don�t necessarily see their proprietors as the salt of the earth and the sum of all virtue. Some are precisely the kind of bosses who resist minimal requirements for pay, workplace safety, non-discrimination, and all the other busybody liberal impositions on private property rights.

But if your mindset is such that the only alternative to deification (Waldman�s term) of big business is deification of small business, it will be difficult for you to develop an agenda attractive to people who don�t own businesses at all, particularly if that requires acknowledgement that labor contributes as much to the success of enterprises as capital. Abandon that rampart, and before you know it, you�re acknowledging the legitimacy not only of government regulation of entrepreneurs on behalf of their empoyees, but of unions! And that way lies socialism, obviously.

So Cantor may be laying out an impossible objective for Republicans in appealing to people they can�t quite respect as the source of anything good other than votes.

Ed Kilgore

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