Double talk and the conservative mentality. A short memory and poor grasp of reality.

[mudplanet]

A friend recently got a job with a social service agency that has a reputation for being "revenue focused." That is, in the social service field this organization has a reputation for "putting billing first." When I told my friend about this, he replied that they preferred to describe it as "productivity focused." And, I wondered, what are you producing if not revenue.

Josh Marshall at TPM and Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_03/022745.php recently wrote pieces on how conservatives torture reality using double talk. But I think its roots go much deeper than current politics. It has a long tradition in American business. Have you ever been in a bank that actually focused on customer needs and didn't regard you as some kind of resource to be exploited? Yet all bank advertising focuses on describing the bank as putting "people first." "We're people kind of people," the ad will say.

Conservatives often say that, "Government should be run like a business." What does that really mean? That we should make a profit on government service? We have government services precisely because there is a lot of stuff that has to be done that isn't profitable, money-wise, to do. People that hate "socialized" health care should also be against "socialized" police and fire services, because that's precisely what they are. The worst hypocrites are those people in rural states who hate "socialism" (even though they haven't got a clue what socialism is) but who refuse to recognize that it was "socialist" laws under FDR in the 1930's that got them their electricity. It was a rural electrification bill that FDR championed that wired most of the rural South and West for electrical services. Until then it had been considered too expensive to provide electrical service to rural households. And it was: if we were to charge rural folks what it really costs to deliver electricity, phone, and mail service we would have to charge them many times the rate that urban users pay. But what we did was "socialize" those services - we underwrote the costs for utility companies to build the infrastructure to deliver electricity to rural households and mandated that they average out the higher costs to provide those services and charge everyone the same rate regardless of their location. If it wasn't for "socialism" those socialism-hating patriots would still be sitting in the dark at night and using outhouses. Yet these folks are consistently strong supporters of conservative politicians.

If conservatives were consistent, they would be asking why we are using state and federal tax dollars to pave roads in places like rural Indiana, Iowa, or Idaho when the people in those places pay insufficient taxes to provide those services? We take tax money from places like California and New York and send it to places like Claptrap, Oklahoma, and Hot Coffee, Nevada, to pave roads so that the rednecks won't have to actually pay in taxes what it costs to provide them with social services (socialized services) like public roads, electricity, and mail delivery.

It's socialism, I tell you.