Perennial Argument

I just don't know what to say. I mean it. I wish you'd stop reading right now, because I'm not sure exactly what to tell you. I mean, you've screwed the pooch a few times before, but this? Seriously? This shit is absurd, even for you.

It was one thing when you were sticking to your guns about capitalism's benefits and how the market would correct itself as you bid for account after account that were essentially vulture projects, half-completed car designs from subcontractors that went out of business before they could finish their projects. I mean, sure, the cars still got to market and your business stayed vital--it was all in line with your philosophies. I mean, you did your work, right? It wasn't your fault that your customers were boneheads who couldn't make anything people actually wanted--you made sure that those speaker panels and cupholders really put the lipstick on that pig.

But this? Now? First you spend three months bending every ear around about how the government shouldn't be bailing out companies, how "too big to fail" is an oxymoron, and then... Pow! You start protesting that your customers haven't gotten their cut. That the car companies are "too big to fail" and will demolish the country--and it's true. I'll give you, it's true, but your business--you who were above the bailouts and who criticized the lender companies for appropriating that bailout money and pulling it out of circulation--YOU wrote a bill to be sure that as a supplier, your invoices would be filled before GM could actually restructure anything. YOU made sure YOU were paid, even at the risk of laying THOUSANDS of employees off even longer.

YOU stood against making this company answer to the government, even as you agitated for the government to line your pockets when the company failed to. You are a mewling infant who backed the wrong horse and then you were unwilling to take the losses that came with it. Even now, even as your paycheck is guaranteed by the taxes of others, you bitch.

The government never did anything for you, after all. Your taxes support a corrupt system which robs you blind and gives you nothing back. Not the bailouts and restructuring that have ensured that you have customers to keep your business afloat, you didn't get those... except you did. And your father's paycheck for thirty years, his pension now, and his health insurance are only paid by taxpayers... but firefighters, they aren't anything that benefits you. Even when you had that drier fire in your first house and called the fire department, you weren't receiving any benefit from your taxes. When you called the police on my mother for breaking into the house on the divorce, your taxes didn't support anything you benefited from. When she went to jail and the taxpayer footed the bill--that was nothing you enjoyed. Both of the children that you sent to state-funded universities--their educations are nothing your taxes should have paid for, right?

What about your brother? His salary as a teacher? His wife's salary? These are evil misappropriations of your tax money? What about your son's paychecks? Both of them, the one from the public schools and the one from the university. You don't think your taxes are benefiting you and your family when they pay for that? For his wife's insurance, since she's disabled? Of course she should be allowed to die, right? Keeping a member of your family alive doesn't benefit you at all.

How about the police and ambulance that were first responders when you were rear-ended on the highway and your car got shoved up and under the back end of a semi? Do you wish that they'd been privatized so that you could have your choice of who pried you out of that crushed aluminum box with the jaws of life?

So I don't even know what to say. I mean, you sit there extolling the virtues of a free market and talking about how the government never gave you anything, but every person you complain to would be living on your couch if not for those taxes. Or not living at all. I think what you really need to learn is how much you have because of your taxes, so here's my proposal. Stop flushing your toilet into that taxpayer-funded sewer system, and everyone in your family who gets a paycheck for the government will stop talking to you, and you can see what that shit coming out of your mouth really amounts to.

Okay, Dad? Happy fucking Father's Day.