Thom Hartmann: The Republican Lie about the Self-Made Myth

[thomhartmann]

From the smallest of small businesses - to the largest of corporations - success is not achieved alone - but with help from society and from the government. Why are Republicans so afraid to admit this - and why can't they give up on the self-made myth? So here's the simple reality. None of us made it on our own. And those of us who have been successful in business have made it because we can use the infrastructure of our court system to enforce our contracts, have workers who had good public educations, and are protected by our fire and police departments, among others. For Takers like Romney to claim that he's a completely self-made man and government had nothing to do with his success is, quite simply, another one of his lies.

The Big Picture with Thom Hartmann on RT TV & FSTV "live" 9pm and 11pm check www.thomhartmann.com/tv for local listings

[MrDiaz]

1. correct

since the government made the roads and the economy in which to strive, there should be a limit on what you can earn, and if you pass this limit the government should heavily tax you so they can recoup some of the funds... makes sense to me!

[chknltl]

2. Won a related argument with a republican friend once.

I pointed out to him that a member of the top one percent uses our infrastructure more than a member of the middle class. When he asked me to prove this I asked him how many fire trucks would it take to put out a full on fire at his home. He has a middle class, three bedroom rambler, so he said two, maybe three. Then I asked him how many fire engines and fire boats would it take to put out a full on fire at Bill Gate's mansion on Lake Washington. He thought about it for a second and in typical republican fashion, my friend quickly changed the subject.

[freshwest]

3. Thanks Thom.

[Cary]

4. The "conservative" ideology

What is it? Where did it come from? Why does it persist?

At the lowest rank and file level it is an unthinking, anti-intellectual, gut level, lizard brain kind of thing that takes in certain messages that appeal to innate bigotry and latent and overt fears of certain authoritarian personalities. These people don't respond to logic or reason. Then "know" what their gut tells them and a big part of this is their hatred of this thing they call "Liberal" and it's something to do with the '60s.

At the highest level we have corporatist who are playing the rubes.

In between we have a noxious soup of Ayn Rand cultists, religionists of almost every stripe, or other misguided souls.

The self-made myth and the anti-government ideas appeal to the top because it feeds their ego and it takes away the barrier of the government, allowing them to pollute and flim flam. As you move down the ranks you are actually going down the rabbit hole so the appeal makes less and less sense.

[Larry Ogg]

5. People that have little or no conscience are so pathologically self-centered...,

that it is impossible for them to escape a delusional world-view, in which other human beings are nothing more then useful objects to be mentally manipulated, or useless obstacles to be rolled over and discarded.

In other words, these sick, evil, sorry asses, see workers as being non-thinking inanimate tools that create nothing on their own. And they would just be standing around like useless clutter taking up space at a job fair. And if not for the “job creators”, most of whom never did a hard days work in their life, workers would simply not have any purpose in life.

It's the mind power of the job creator that builds empires, workers are just tools that ware out and can be replaced, and it would make no sense at all to an extremely self-centered person to give credit to a tool.

[HopeHoops]

6. K&R

[rexcat]

7. Well stated.