You can count me as one of the many people who would like to see the federal government adopt a more business-like mindset. If it was up to me, our elected officials would make all of their decisions based on cost and cost alone. No rhetoric. No morality. No party line. Just money. Profit.
Incarcerating pot heads and minor drug offenders. Seriously, do we need to keep building prisons to house these guys? I don’t like the idea of paying for daycare for my own kid, much less somebody else’s. How about we just throw a Baby Einstein in the DVD player and call it a day?
“I Believe” license plates, Christmas carols at schools, Intelligent Design in the classrooms. The courts have been pretty clear on this stuff. Any legislator who champions one of these causes doesn’t care about wasting taxpayer money. He is a first-class moron who doesn’t understand that if you let in one, you have to let them all in. And that includes not only Allah, but L. Ron Hubbard and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Ramen.
Public education. Yeah, it’s expensive. But the better it is, and the better educated the populace is, the better society as a whole is. Crime is tied to poverty, and poverty is tied to education. An educated populace is a productive populace. And when you’re being productive, you don’t have time to steal cars and break into your neighbor’s house. At least not until your lunch break.
Universal healthcare. I know I can’t be the only progressive who feels like we’ve got another Phantom Menace on our hands. George Lucas made a multimillion monstrosity that crushed the dreams of an entire generation who had anxiously awaited the return of the Star Wars saga to the big screen. Call me crazy, but with healthcare reform, I have a feeling that we the people are going to be asking for a ticket refund.
A war in Afghanistan. Not worth it. That is unless you take into account the coming oil crisis. And quite frankly, we need our hands on as many pipelines as possible. I’ve watched Dune enough times to know that he who controls the spice controls the universe. (Oh, and stay away from Sting, especially when he’s wearing a speedo.)
This sort of business-minded approach to government, where budgets are balanced and debts are paid off, is the kind of thing that the Tea Party claims to be all for. But already it’s become quite apparent that the religious fundamentalists who helped marginalize the GOP — reducing it to a party of warmongers, anti-abortionists, and angry white guys — have already established a foothold in the movement.
Thanks to this Tea Party faction, the war on Christmas is making the news like it’s 2004, and the movement’s de facto political leader, Jim DeMint, is once again telling anybody and everybody that gay folks really creep him out. And that’s a shame. We can’t continue to spend at the levels we do today and hope to remain prosperous.
Well, that is unless we continue to push our country — our company — to grow, to seek new markets, to buy up as many of our competitors as we can. That’s what big businesses do.
Now, I know this whole mega-corporation idea probably scares some folks, particularly the free-market enemies who don’t want the U.S. to generate new revenue streams, to tap into previously untapped demos, to set up franchises in exotic locales. I get it.
Wealth and materialism and all that go against your kumbaya, hippie-dippie ideology, where each one of us lives off the food we grow on our own little plot of land and goes to sleep each night in a house we built with our own hands. That’s fine.
But as both Ayn Rand and Gordon Gekko can attest, greed is good. And right now, our company needs a few greedy men.
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