Take That, Paul Ryan!

Paul Krugman, as usual, hits it right on the head: a very clear -- and clear-headed -- exposition of what went wrong and who did it.

Well, what I’ve been hearing with growing frequency from members of the policy elite — self-appointed wise men, officials, and pundits in good standing — is the claim that it’s mostly the public’s fault. The idea is that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.

So this seems like a good time to point out that this blame-the-public view isn’t just self-serving, it’s dead wrong.

The fact is that what we’re experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious. And by trying to shift the blame to the general populace, elites are ducking some much-needed reflection on their own catastrophic mistakes.

This group includes what Digby calls "the Villagers." You remember the Villagers -- they're the ones with the torches and pitchforks.

No one ever said they were right. In fact, if you've read the book, you know they weren't -- just ignorant and frightened.

Sounds like a match, to me.

A further thought: It occurs to me that, in spite of what you're hearing from the orthodox Randians, the parasite class doesn't create wealth -- they appropriate it. With the full connivance of our government. And not a single damned one of them could have made it to where they are without the rest of us.

Update: Here's some good background from Jonathan Turley on the Randian takeover of the Republican party, with particular reference to Paul Ryan's atrocity of a "budget proposal." This part struck me:

The core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.

See what I said above about who actually produces wealth. Rand's "philosophy," if you want to dignify it by that, is pretty much upside down. Ask yourself why we have societies to begin with. Why is sociality an adaptive trait? I suspect it's not because it allows the strong to keep everything for themselves. In fact, every society I can think of that ever went that route collapsed pretty quickly.