Argle Bargle, Bafflegab, and Gobbledegook

Maybe you've seen this meme floating around the internets...

A conservative friend of mine recently shared it with me on FB and suggested that I teach it to my students at school.

Here is my (lengthy) response (for the tl;dr version, the title of this blog post pretty much sums up my opinion of the meme):

Teach this to 10 year-olds?

I guess I could teach a lesson on how to properly attribute quotations…

A cursory Google search for Dr. Adrian Rogers instantly showed that the attribution at the bottom is wrong.

Aside from that, Wiki notes that the good "Dr."/Pastor Rogers (b. 1931) spent most of his life defending the literal inerrancy of the Bible and once said some pretty inflammatory things about slavery.  He was pro-life, pro-death penalty, and pro-hetero to the point that he boycotted Disney because he perceived that they promoted homosexuality. 

In other words, his Southern Baptist Christian beliefs were completely antithetical to the West Coast Methodist beliefs I was taught at my church every Sunday.

And while all this doesn’t address the content of the meme you posted, it does raise a red flag for the reader to proceed with caution… 

Warning:  Bafflegab Ahead!  (I guess I could teach my class a new vocabulary word, bafflegab…)

Anyway, here goes nothing…

1.  “You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.”

Seems like a bit of a straw man to me, as if freedom is strictly an economic concept.  Also, it implies that the economy is a zero-sum game where there is a set limit of money.  But, sure, let’s pretend those things are true and imagine “the total amount of money in America is, say, a hundred dollars, and one person owns $97 of those dollars,and you make a law saying that that one person has to give a lot of that money back to the government and the government will give it to all the people who just have a few cents, they would be more prosperous…”(emphasis added)

(Again, are we conflating wealth with freedom?  YMMV)

But if you’re thinking that’s unfair to Mr. $97, think about how the opposite has been true throughout history.  Governments have legislated the poor out of freedom by legislating the wealthy into (even more) freedom using “capitalism’s primary weapons: colonialism, imperialism, systems of taxation and slavery…The Spanish,the British, and now the Americans have been the most merciless and brutal exploiters of both human beings and resources in history…We in North America reside on land that was stolen from indigenous populations followed by brutal systematic genocide, and then followed by generations of institutionalized racism and exclusion.  Women, African and Native Americans were barred from the political process and any semblance of economic power until well into the 20th century.”

I do teach my students about The Trail of Tears, and even 10 year-olds tend to think Native Americans were treated pretty unfairly.

2. “What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving.”

I don’t think that’s usually the case at all.  Everyone benefits from paying taxes for education (even if your kid goes to private school) because an educated work force helps our economy.  Everyone benefits from police and fire departments (even if they don't regularly call on them) because they keep our homes, businesses, and cities safe.  Everyone benefits from available health care (even if you haven’t used it - everyone will in their lifetime) because going to the ER costs all insurance customers.  These are but a few examples. 

Besides, that quote could be describing CEOs making hundreds of times more than their employees or even TARP, the program that used billions of our tax dollars to bail out AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America, and the auto industry.

3.  “The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.”

While economically speaking, this may be true, why does it seem like individual welfare recipients are always demonized but not the corporations that cost our government billions?  Or do fiscal conservatives agree with politicians like Bernie that our current economic system tends to let corporations privatize profits while socializing their losses?

But, if we’re talking about laws the government makes, then #3 is not necessarily true.  The government can give equal marriage rights to queer folk without taking away heteronormative marriage.

4.  “You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”

Would that that be true for cancer cells!  (Or our elites that want to divide this country into warring tribes of left vs. right all while multiplying their wealth.)  

Alas, you can multiply wealth by dividing it.  You can divide labor by creating different companies and that creates more wealth.  You can divide workloads to maximize efficiency and that multiplies wealth.  

But even if you couldn’t, you could still distribute wealth in a more just and equitable manner.  Our democracy is based on equality.  But capitalism doesn’t much care for (or need) equality – quite the opposite – it needs competition, winners and losers.  Our democratic government is there to check capitalism’s power, on behalf of all of its people.  When that check is corrupted by money, then equality and true democracy cease to exist.

5.  “When half the people…”

50%?  Really?  Again with the Us versus Them language, pitting citizens against one another… needlessly tribalizing us as a nation.  Once more, we could flip that around with the CEO/janitor scenario, but really, doesn’t this whole meme seem a bit silly now? 

Clearly, these Five Very Definitive Statements have all sorts of caveats. 

Basically, they are meaningless, pseudo-intellectual rubbish when scrutinized for more than a few minutes, hence the title of my post.