I suppose it was inevitable, but this rightwingnut / libertarian derp from Edward A Studzinski in the latest Commentary is just remarkable, especially so given the covid ordeal we just went through:
Many years ago Mike Royko wrote a column entitled “A ChicagoFest Lesson” for the Chicago Sun-Times that espoused bringing back the draft (compulsory military service). One of his arguments was that those who had been exposed to the draft got to see first-hand how big government was “unwieldy, wasteful, indifferent to the individual, bullying, secretive and bureaucratic. And anyone who has been exposed to it for two or three years will come out disliking anything like it.” Contrarily he made the point that “those generations to whom the government is just a smiling face on a TV set ……. will be the easiest for government to control and manipulate.” Think about that the next time you see on television a governor or Federal official at a podium, with a row of flags against the wall behind him or her, with another row of Charlie McCarthys interposed in between.
I have never seen the argument that mil service leads (invariably!) to gov hatred. The ex-mil people I know or have worked with are mostly patriotic and also staunchly idealistic plus realistic about government. Also, mostly but not always, independent-minded. Royko was kneejerk most of his career, and the opposite of deep, but the above, which I missed, is unusual for him. One must assume Studz was throwing things at Fauci et alia the last year: that last sentence, wow --- from another, Reaganesque decade.
Anyway, a strangely wack and reactionary out-of-the-blue set of swipes.
Comments
They never talk about the absurd farce that passes for shareholder democracy at corporations where the majority of shareholders can vote for a proposal to address climate change and company execs can ignore it because it's "non-biding," or how executives or buddies with the CEO or manager end up on the boards of directors of companies and funds and rubber stamp every executive action. Or worse, how about the fact that it is one share one vote rather than one person one vote in the corporate world, so only the wealthiest shareholders have any say at all regarding how companies that rule the world are governed?
Regarding waste, what about the ridiculous salaries executives receive for driving companies into the ground--the hilarious irony of Carly Fiorina receiving vast sums for ruining Hewlett Packard and then talking about "government waste" while running for political office. What about the terrible acquisitions companies spend money on, how they leverage up their balance sheets to the point of destruction just to do more corporate buybacks, how they treat the world's natural resources like their own personal playpen. How they engineered the 2008 financial crisis by leveraging their bets on junk mortgages 100 to 1 and then used government resources and taxpayer dollars to bail themselves out? Where were the complaints about wasteful government spending when the Fed agreed to backstop all those junk bonds last March and saved their stock and bond assets? But the only thing we hear about is wasteful bureaucratic government. At least in a functioning democracy if I don't like a politician I can go into a voting booth to get rid of him and my vote counts as much as the next citizen. Try doing that with a CEO you don't like if you're not a billionaire.
Apparently, banks and funds are too big to fail, but the American people aren't. So what was necessary government spending for the former is wasteful for the latter. Of course, one significant source of private sector waste is the fees investors pay active managers espousing these libertarian views. How many billions are paid each year to money managers who routinely underperform a benchmark you can track now for free or almost for free in index funds and ETFs?