Can we talk about the things that most “liberals” don’t understand? Here’s the thing. I keep listening to the cable news and the so-called mainstream media and – okay, listening isn’t quite the right word. My living room is the scene of some pretty loud and vocal one-way debates that consist of me yelling at the television, “Gah! You don’t GET it!! Did you HEAR what he just said???”

And the truth is that no, most of the time most of the people really do not hear what “he” just said. Oh, we hear the words, but we don’t understand the subtext. Like when they ask, “Isn’t saying you want Obama to fail saying that you want the country to fail?” Most people don’t get the fact that the “failure of the United States” means something different to conservatives than it does to liberals.

To the true conservative mindset, capitalism – naked, greedy capitalism – has not failed us. When they say that the “fundamentals of the economy are strong”, that’s exactly what they mean. The fundamentals of capitalism DEPEND on the scenario that we are currently living. It’s all part of the cycle. A company grows until it is too large – or too stupid – to sustain itself any longer. At that point, it fails and its assets get gobbled up at bargain prices.

The only real solution to the banking crisis is to leave the banks alone, let them collapse and let new banks step in to pick up the business that the fallen banks can no longer service. The solution to the real estate boondoggle is to let housing prices fall until people can afford to buy them again. The solution to the auto makers crisis is to let them go out of business so that the plants can be bought by people who will run them “more efficiently” – read, pay workers lower wages because they’ll be happy to get a job paying -anything- by that time.

In their eyes, the success of a country is not measured by the average standard of living of ALL of its people. It is measured solely by the growth of the GDP, and if the bulk of that growth goes into just a few pockets, that’s what capitalism is all about.

Somewhere along the line, there’s a disconnect. Things got reversed. Instead of capitalism being a tool that serves the country, the country and its people became a tool that serves capitalism, a money-making machine for a privileged few.

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