Lord of the Lies

Four days to the election and the one thing that McCain seems to be getting some traction on is this idea that Obama is a socialist who wants to redistribute the wealth and rob Joe the Plumber of his just rewards. The knee-jerk negative response that the word "socialist" elicits in most Americans has to do with the idea that a society where the government tries to provide a leg up to the less fortunate is somehow antithetical to the very qualities that make this a great and dynamic country. That it--and I really hate words like this--deincentivizes people from striving and creating because it punishes success and rewards failure. There may be some truth to that, but the heart of most people's resistance has more to do with their ambivalence about government in general. I think that the relationship of the government to the people is like the relationship of parents to children. Children want to be free to do whatever they want without anyone setting boundaries, and at the same time they need someone to set and enforce boundaries. We all know what happens when children are left alone without adults to set boundaries for them: They go Lord of the Flies. The idea that the financial markets would self-regulate is as absurd as the idea that a group of children would share a plate of cookies fairly among themselves because it's the right thing to do. They won't. They're fucking children. They'll eat as much as they want to eat even if it makes them sick, even if another kid doesn't get any. Societies have laws and government because they need them; the trick is finding the right balance between individual freedom and the health and well-being of the group. We all naturally do things out of personal interest, but sometimes personal interest can blind us with short term needs that actually harm us in the long run (like those kids with the cookies). We've just spent the past eight years under the rule of a really bad parent, an unfair parent, who favored some of his children over the others, who let some run wild, while others suffered abuse and neglect. Now the time has come to find a good parent again, someone who will undo the harm that the bad parent caused. We need good government again, and no amount of name-calling, fear-mongering or character assassination can change that. I just hope the adult children of this great country recognize that if they wind up electing John McCain, they will have replaced one bad parent with another.