{"id":29993,"date":"2012-08-31T05:00:48","date_gmt":"2012-08-31T10:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=29993"},"modified":"2012-08-31T06:42:16","modified_gmt":"2012-08-31T11:42:16","slug":"the-parasite-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=29993","title":{"rendered":"The Parasite Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last March, I sat in the studio at AM1280 and announced, along with Ed, that we were celebrating our eight anniversary on the air.<\/p>\n

As I was making the announcement, a round-faced man in a green jacked barged into the studio. \u00a0“I was part of that!”<\/p>\n

I turned off the mike and had Tommy throw to a commercial. \u00a0“Who are you?”<\/p>\n

“I’m Fred Pankey. \u00a0I’m the manager at the Rainbow Foods on University that you’ve been shopping at for most of the past 20 odd years”.<\/p>\n

He stood there.<\/p>\n

“And…”<\/p>\n

“And this anniversary is partly ours, too.”<\/p>\n

“How do you figure”, I asked.<\/p>\n

“You ate in the last eight years, right?”<\/p>\n

“Right”<\/p>\n

“And you bought your food at Rainbow?”<\/p>\n

“A lot of it, yes…”<\/p>\n

“So the Northern Alliance owes part of its credit to us at Rainbow. Without groceries, there’d be no radio show.<\/p>\n

“In other words, what you’re saying is…”
\n“You didn’t do this”.<\/p>\n

“Ah”<\/p>\n

To be fair, it was no dumber a display than\u00a0Nick Kristoff’s bit on the NYTimes\u00a0<\/a>the other day.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to quote from it – go ahead and read it if you want – but it’s the standard lefty strawman on the subject; “Look! \u00a0We found a businesswoman who says “Yes, I did build it!”, but who actually got a government loan! \u00a0She is TEH HEPPOCREET!”<\/p>\n

Like government wants a cookie for doing stuff we – including all of us who aren’t entrepreneurs –\u00a0already paid it to do<\/em> including all of the things we’d rather not have paid for it to do!<\/p>\n

And as if the businesswoman whom Kristoff mocks wouldn’t have been an entrepreneur, wouldn’t have found a way, without the government programs she promoted to other businesspeople.<\/p>\n

It’s like the lefty nutslap who tried to call me “teh heppocrete” for riding the Ventura Trolley, a light rail line I opposed (and oppose). \u00a0I paid for, then and now, at tax time and at the fare box. \u00a0Or for riding on a bike path that I thought was a needless budgetary frippery at a time when the city and county it ran through were whinging about their budgets.<\/p>\n

It’s my property. \u00a0By your leave, I’ll ride ’em both,\u00a0and\u00a0exercise\u00a0my First Amendment.<\/p>\n

By the way? You didn’t make that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last March, I sat in the studio at AM1280 and announced, along with Ed, that we were celebrating our eight anniversary on the air. As I was making the announcement, a round-faced man in a green jacked barged into the studio. \u00a0“I was part of that!” I turned off the mike and had Tommy throw […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29993"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30011,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29993\/revisions\/30011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}