Comment of the day

Paul Krugman's NY Times article regarding the great ideological divide, "A Tale of Two Moralities" produced some excellent commentary on the topic. Here is one of the better ones:

Paul '52
New York, NY
January 14th, 2011

About a year ago a dinner companion, an accountant in LA, noted that some of his clients, farm owners in the Imperial Valley, had to scramble to raise the money to pay estate taxes, and wasn't that unfair?

And I noted that the Imperial Valley is a desert, and his clients are millionaires because government dammed the Colorado River, bringing water and cheap electro power to the desert. And he said "I never thought of that."

Frankly, I found that totally amazing.

For a couple of decades now the propaganda of the elite right has gone totally unanswered, and people have come to agree with such nonsense as "government doesn't create wealth," "government doesn't create jobs," and "people can make choices to spend their money better than government can spend it for them." As if the Hoover Dam, the TVA, the space program and the internet would have been built without government, and as if the shareholders of UPS and FedEx would have any interest in these investments if government hadn't built the highway system.

It's long past time. We need to look at nonsense and say, "That's nonsense."