Beck: Parsing Guilts And Allegiances

From Billy Beck:

"Actually, if you read the manifesto, you see that he is not upset at big government itself but that big government never helps him.

He whines and whines about how the government, big business, his accountant, etc in short anyone but him have screwed him over and refused to help. He whines and whines and whines that government helps out everyone BUT him and his grievance isn't that the government is invasive but that it is not invasive in his favor.

He seemed perfectly happy to feed at the public trough when the military was pumping money into aerospace in southern California and he was pissed off that when the Cold War finished and his gravy train ended that the government didn't charge in a make everything better.

He bitches that he came to Austin and couldn't compete against the business that already existed. Bitching that others outcompete you and that the government should make sure you get a fair shot in business is not a libertarian point of view.

This guy never even had a thought about personal responsibility and self-reliance.

He's not a libertarian/classical-liberal. He's a greedy little piglet who is angry that the bigger piglets pushed him off the teat he felt his by divine right."

That's Shannon Love, posting the most perceptive comment I've seen yet on what's being called the manifesto of Andrew Joseph Stack, the person thought to have crashed an airplane into a building including IRS offices in Austin, Texas today.

Everybody with a political axe to grind will be throwing this dead cat back & forth across opposing fences until even after the body is disintegrated, and it might be helpful if people knew what the game was really about.