Originally Posted by
excon
Hello this:
I couldn't have said it better than this guy did, and I copied it from NK's list. It's just the beginning, but you kinda get the gist of it:
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You scare me because you want to kill the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world.
So here we go:
"to kill the American capitalist goose"
Apparently Pritchett has not been paying attention this last year. It's his Republican cronies that have almost killed that Goose—whichever way you look at it: whether by "deregulating" until the economy was almost dead, or by bailouts that put the government in charge of banks.
Obama, at every turn, has been trying to keep the goose from committing suicide.
"the American capitalist goose"
You've got to give him credit for this one—it's really slick. Notice how he ties "American" to "capitalist", as though there were something about it in the constitution.
The truth is, of course, that presidents from Jefferson to Lincoln and beyond have warned this country about the dangers, to America, of unbridled capitalism and giant corporations.
There is a difference between a free market and a market dominated by multinational corporations. But it's conservative policy to constantly conflate the two, and then pretend that the combination is somehow patriotic.
"the American capitalist goose that lays the golden egg which provides the highest standard of living in the world."
This is also nicely done. It's such a big claim, and yet it's buried so deeply in the structure of the sentence.
You're not supposed to notice this claim at all, consciously. You're supposed to assume it's true without really thinking about it.
And, if you do think about it, he's wrapped the idea completely in the flag—so that you won't question it.
Wouldn't it be unbelievably unpatriotic to ask, even for a moment, whether Americans really do have the highest standard of living in the world?
Actually it wouldn't be. In fact, it would be classy of us to admit that we didn't, if that were the fact.
And it is.
There are a great many ways to calculate "standard of living" but under almost any objective system, the U.S. does not rank first, or even second, or third. That's just the truth.
The door you just heard slamming was Pritchett giving up on me an an America-hater—for admitting the truth.
We do rank pretty high, by the way—anywhere from 6th to 17th (and that's out of a lot of countries). Just not highest. But of course admitting that would be un-American to Pritchett, because guys like him don't think that it's patriotic to tell the truth.
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excon