On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 3:48 PM, Doug Henwood <[email protected]> wrote: > I've been writing a lot of stuff about the strike over the last few days: > > http://lbo-news.com. >
Doug, Thanks for sharing this. I especially enjoyed your dissection of the ideological construct of "taxpayer". This is almost as Orwellian as "job creator", but while the letter phrase has received a lot of well-deserved derision, even progressives embrace the taxpayer construct. I think the biggest problem with this concept is one that you didn't mention - the profoundly anti-democratic idea that a person's opinion matters proportionally to the dollar amount of taxes he/she pays. I suppose this would be an improvement to a system where a person's influence is proportional to their *wealth*, but still, whatever happened to the concept of a *citizen*? -----------------------snip In a post yesterday (“Why teachers unions are different: A reply to Doug Henwood”), Matt Yglesias takes exception to my speculation on why elite liberals don’t like teachers unions (“Why do so many liberals hate teachers’ unions?”). Boiling it down to a soundbite: unlike labor disputes in the private sector, where raises would come out of the pockets of shareholders, raises for public sector workers come out of the pockets of “taxpayers,” meaning you, me, Matt, and everyone else—mostly, that is, people of fairly modest means. This use of “taxpayers” is a fascinating bit of ideology. Its dispersion into wide use marks a very successful deployment by the right of a very conservative notion. It is founded on a view that one lives in this world primarily as an individual, and consumes privately. Any sense of collective consumption (or investment, if you prefer), via the public budget, is ruled out. As is so often the case with right-wing concepts, reactionaries have a much clearer and more consistent sense of the politics behind their buzzword. Liberals, or neoliberals, like Yglesias import the right’s concepts without fully integrating them into their worldview. Yglesias wouldn’t support Paul Ryan’s fiscal policy, but he’s happy to use a word that’s deeply implicated in its underlying concepts. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
