Walking along the Boston waterfront on Sunday it was impossible to miss all the private water craft moored along side the various residential piers. As usual, the spouse reacted to these toys, used infrequently and ranging in size from a row boat to a double-wide, as a waste of money that could be used better for something else.
I, on the other hand, saw them as an opportunity for somebody to build something for which he had no personal use and getting paid a good salary for a job well done. Which, after all, is one of the ideals of the Democratic process.
After giving it some more thought, I was reminded that one of the Globe's op-ed columnists not long ago included the opinion in his column that "everybody wants to be rich"--an opinion with which I have to disagree. Certainly, I don't want to be rich and I wouldn't want one of those craft bobbing in Boston harbor, if you gave me one.
And I don't think I'm all that peculiar. Lots of people don't want to be rich. What they want is not to be denied the OPPORTUNITY to get rich, if that's what they wanted to do. And therein lies a big difference. And therein lies a mistake the Democrats are making, when they suggest that their policies would give more to the middle class and less to the rich. They are not only antagonizing the rich (not all, but some) but they are antagonizing those who might want to become rich by suggesting that the game is somehow fixed.
While there was a long period of history when the amount of money available was fixed and whenever someone got more someone else got less, that's no longer the case (thank Richard Nixon for liberating our currency from the store of gold). Pretending that it is is manipulative, if not deceptive. And deception tends to generate resentment and properly so.
Which leads me to the observation that the Republican mantra of providing tax cuts, being based on the same flawed assumption that the money available is somehow fixed, is also deceptive. But not in the sense that Democrats have so far tried to emphasise in pointing out that tax cuts by one governmental authority merely lead to increasing taxes by others since the services being provided are obviously necessary and desirable.
While the rationale for the transfer of the taxing responsibility, as well as the delivery of services from one governmental authority to another actually used to have a basis in fact in that some services are more efficiently and effectively delivered on the local level (a national fire suppression agency would undoubtedly be overwhelmed by complexity), there is no logical basis for the current administration's distribution of tax cuts. Not even in restrospect. for the ostensible purpose of stimulating private enterprise just hasn't happened.
And there's a good reason for why it hasn't happened. That's because the tax cuts were just a distraction from the fact that, in exchange for getting a tax cut, we were expected to give up a lot of our personal freedoms.
Now, you may quibble that a bribe is a payment of money or a favor delivered in exchange for looking the other way or ignoring some illegal behavior on the part of an official person. One may also question whether a payment that is delivered by someone else (in this case the Congress of the U.S.) can be classified as a bribe. But the fact remains that in a system of government where the ultimate responsibility to assure compliance with the law rests with the people, the promise of tax cuts has been accompanied by a gross violation of our Constitution--i.e. the fundamental law of the land.
It may be ironic, but it seems that the supporters of law and order have been bought off with a few dollars. As a result, our whole nations is now perceived as an outlaw by most of the people on this globe.