I DON’T WORK FOR A LIVING, BUT I PRETEND THAT I DO WHEN I’M CAMPAIGNING FOR A LIVING, PART II

8/18/11

So why am I not nearly as enthusiastic about Texas Governor Rick Perry as are people who think a lot like I do? For the same reason I’m not working up much of a sweat over Representative Paul Ryan. While both these gentleman, for the most part and when we get away from what is laughingly called “defense,” mouth ideas that should appeal to me, they don’t appeal to me because they are both representative of a type that has become so prevalent in the Republican Party, to wit, the champion of the private sector who, despite his never ending pledges of fealty to that sector has never seen fit to participate in it.

Oh, yes, these guys argue, the private sector and free enterprise are the answer to all our problems, the private sector built this country, the private sector can lead us out of our difficulties if the big, bad public sector would just get out of the way. But the actions of these types speak far more loudly than their words. A frequently used barb in the politics of the past, back when grownups ran this country, was that one’s opponent “had never met a payroll.” But the modern acolyte of free enterprise and the private sector has never even been on a private sector payroll; indeed, he or she has never even held a public sector job which involved providing services for which the taxpayers paid. Rather, he or she has been, to put it more nicely than I would have preferred but for the understandable sensitivities of my readership, slopping at the public trough his or her whole “adult” life, gratifying his or her outsized ego at the taxpayers’ considerable expense. Governor Perry went right from the Air Force (an admirable place to spend part of one’s life, admittedly) to public office. Representative Ryan has been a politician or working for a politician his whole life. He may have done a stint at “consulting,” but, really, what type of “consultation” can a lifelong public payroller provide that would be worth anything? For a “between offices” or “post office” pol, “consulting” amounts to “influence selling.” Some might, with a straight face, argue that such influence peddling is a legitimate endeavor, but no one who is even remotely honest would equate such meretriciousness to honest work in the private sector providing a good or service that someone would pay for were it not for the gargantuan size of the government these plastic people piously purport to oppose.

If these free market types are so enamored of the private sector, one would think they would have garnered some experience in it. Among the GOPers running for office, Ron Paul and Herman Cain started out in the private sector. For all his faults, even Mitt Romney has some private sector experience, though, one suspects, that given his background and his family’s background, much of that “private sector” experience came dangerously close to little more than door opening. The others, like many, if not most politicians, even GOP politicians, have either spent their lives on the public payroll or have entered the “private sector” to cash in on their public sector experience while waiting for the next opportunity to belly up to the public trough to become available.

Those who have spent their lives working in the private sector do not need to be lectured on its wonders by those who have at the very best only a passing familiarity with it.