Be Fruitful And Multiply, You Dirty Peons

I thought this was a joke when I first saw it, but then I remembered I’m in America in 2017, where there is nothing so ignorant, inane, dangerous, offensive or stupid that it isn’t being seriously suggested by one of our political leaders. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, objectivist, policy wonk and all around deep thinker:

“This is going to be the new economic challenge for America: people. Baby boomers are retiring — I did my part, but we need to have higher birth rates in this country,” Ryan, a father of three, told reporters as he riffed on how Republicans will tackle entitlement and welfare reform in 2018. “Baby boomers are retiring and we have fewer people following them in the workforce.

”We have something like a 90-percent increase in the retirement population of America but only a 19-percent increase in the working population in American,” he continued. “So what do we have to do? Be smarter, more efficient, more technology … still gonna need more people.”

And here I thought the poor were poor because they fornicated too much and had babies they couldn’t afford.

We really do have one of the most viciously greedy, stupidly short-sighted, arrogant ruling classes in all of history. It is truly jaw-dropping. This asshole is about to shepherd through Congress a gigantic tax break for the richest human beings who’ve ever walked the earth, while simultaneously raising taxes and eliminating deductions for working and middle class people. The ink isn’t even dry on the bill and he’s already promising to cut entitlements for the poor and the middle class in order to pay for (some) of it; entitlements which, by the way, he personally benefited from as a young lad, which afforded him the time and leisure to work through all the heady concepts in Atlas Shrugged, but never mind. 

And what does he say to the people he’s about to rob and kick to the curb?

Go out and have more babies.

What does Paul Ryan say to strapped part-time workers who can’t afford a home, can’t afford rent, can’t pay off student loans, can’t find full-time work, and who live one accident away from financial catastrophe? He looks right at them and sneeringly says, “I’m raising your taxes, I’m taking away your health insurance, I’m taking away the deduction on your student loan payment, I’m adding a trillion dollars to the deficit, and I’m ripping off what little Social Security you had coming, but, hey, it’s not my fault. We just don’t have enough people paying into the system. Don’t blame me, go out and have more babies.

Paul Ryan says to go out and have more babies, even though he knows it wouldn’t change anything he does: He is a Randian who opposes the welfare state on philosophical grounds. Even if there were more people paying into the system, he would still want to cut entitlements. Even if the poor squeezed out a billion bright new shiny taxpayers who could fund the social safety net, he’d still work day and night to take it away from them. He’s a thoroughly dishonest scoundrel kicking down at the poor, and he knows it (and he’s doing it with glib, number- crunchy jargon that Beltway imbeciles mistake for deep wonky thought … ninety-percent increase in retirement but only nineteen percent increase in workforce … gotta have more efficiency, gotta have more technology, need more people, yep, uh-huh. Can’t argue with the numbers …)

There are 7 billion people and rising in the world. The human species is placing an unsustainable burden on the planet and rapidly depleting its resources. The climate is warming faster than even the most pessimistic scientists have predicted. Paul Ryan doesn’t care. He wants to cut taxes and gut social spending, and in order to do it he’ll ignore all common sense and all common decency, smirk at the camera and say, go out and have more babies.

All of this so a few hundred rich families and corporations can pay less taxes and get even richer.

The United States was created by morally compromised but deeply intellectual men steeped in the Enlightenment; it is being destroyed by shallow con-men and venal sociopaths with a smattering of cheap philosophy and bottomless greed. Take a good look at this dorky moral vacuum. He’s strangling the country for a few greasy coins and a permanent seat in our banal aristocracy. That’s it. That’s all. A little money and status. That is the alpha and omega in his gnat-sized conception of life. A little money and status. It is for this the country must be drained and it's people fleeced. Now reflect on the sad and pathetic fact that in 2017 America there was no political force that could thwart him.