What do taxes buy the rich

Listening to the "Majority Report" on Air America, I was amused by Janeane Garofalo's father insisting that the rich do not benefit from government spending as much as everyone else. The hosts of the show rightly insisted that the rich benefit more from government spending, that it is government spending and our nation's infrastructure that allows them to be rich in the first place. They brought up a couple good examples of gimmes that corporations get from the governments that allow them to make money easily--roads, ports, things like that. They also pointed out that government regulation helps them exist, which her father, as a good conservative, vehemently denied. Again, they were right though they had trouble articulating why. The reason that they are right is that without government regulation, business would eat itself. Look at how it took like 5 minutes for Enron to devour itself, which good government regulation could have probably prevented. Government regulation keeps up investor and customer confidence and keeps the cash a-flowing.

If you think about it, our entire society is geared towards the feeding and the pampering of the wealthy--the few bones they throw us only come our way to keep up quiet and hard-working. FDR knew this better than anyone--it was either control the devastation of the Depression or deal with a full-scale Communist revolt. The rich hated him; he saved their sorry asses anyway.

Which led me to think of the two most important things that government buys the rich and the corporate heads--the goodwill of the nation and security. They could, if they wanted to, build their own roads and ports. They could fight out who owned the airwaves in court. They could go without regulation and the steady flow of cash, if they really wanted to. They could set up schools to educate the children of their workers in exchange for another generation's worth of work. It would be disorganized, but corporations and the wealthy class that owns them could fill some of the holes that loss of government would make in their money-making infrastructure.

But they need our goodwill. People have schools for their kids, clean streets, peaceful neighborhoods, trees and parks, FHA home loans, and a shot at college education, all of which keeps them from eyeballing the rich with an angry eye. But many greedy, short-sighted people are flushing the Shrub with cash in hopes to take those things away so that they can grab some of the cash that funds that stuff for themselves. If they succeed to the lengths that they want to succeed, they will have angry people on their hands.

Which leads to the other thing the government buys for the rich--security. Sometimes I wonder if those who are buying influence and who want to shrink the government to nothing really have an inkling of what life would be like where wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few and there is no government control. Especially in a nation where the population is as heavily armed as ours. But of course they know--that's why the gated communities and the private security forces. Well, those private security forces aren't worth much. The muscle that keeps our society in order is the police and the military. I realize that conservatives think that they can keep taxes at little to nothing by cutting everything but the military and the police, but they are fooling themselves, as our current military-spending maniac in office has demonstrated.