Sunday, August 19, 2012

Iron Rice Bowl and The Ryan Budget




The is an ancient expression from China regarding an “Iron Rice Bowl” and it has to do with Bureaucracy and being fed for the rest of your life once you pass the civil service test and serve the Emperor, god on earth.

The communist mechanism of Mao used the phrase also and it indicated the ideal state in which all in service to the state in a communist sense would be fed forever.  The state might not be perfect but the iron rice must, should go on forever.

Young Paul Ryan who is a perfect Catholic, but without any traditional “social teaching” values from all accounts, and who has served all his adult life in service to the state and not in private industry has come up with an proposed financial outline to remake the United States Federal Budget and Bureaucracy on a scale not seen since Lenin, Stalin and Mao and not since the Russian and Chinese Communist revolutions.

It is amazing how the elitist front office ideas of private industry have invaded government thinking and are being proposed in a lopsided theoretical manner by green country club gated community minded types like Paul Ryan.  Doesn’t he know how painful to 40 to 60 percent of the population his redistribution of wealth and rice from the iron rice bowl will be in reality to 40 to 60 percent of the population who would get a voucher and like with some stick thrown for a dog, get the master's command to “go and fetch suitable healthcare with that voucher" (a worthless in reality piece of paper).  Yeah right.  Wishful fantasy I think and not very “brilliant” managerial social engineering.

Same thing with food stamps. Like taking food out of the mouths of the young, the poor, the disabled and the elderly and in return getting a pamphlet from the government on the virtues of self-reliance and telling the story of President Romney’s ancestor’s trekking through the wilderness to the paradise of Utah and by the grace of God and all that.  And why aren’t you self-reliant and why should I feed you with taxes on my billionaires when my ancestors set a standard of performance “you” little “people” seem to fail to understand or grasp.

A lot of hungry people start revolutions and pull monarchs out of their Versailles beltway bubbles or Winter Palaces when the Iron Rice Bowl of the state fails to deliver on its social contract with the governed.

This recently resurrected elitist eighteenth and nineteenth century view of the world as opposed to a world and its modern interconnected global needs just doesn't cut muster or the mustard with The Ryan Budget thingy and the “modern” GOP.

These out of touch at the top elites in business, politics and religion are about to find out by the simple rules of physics, of the shift of gravity that happens when the 99% start jumping up and down and cause earthquakes.  Palaces and penthouses will collapse down to street level with the people already on the ground, practiced in the politics of everyday rice bowl reality.

History will repeat itself unless the greedy pull back and learn to live with mere billions and not trillions of private wealth.

“Scepter and Crown must tumble down and in the dust be equal made with the poor crooked Sithe and Spade.”

Forget your Bullshit Budget Paul Ryan!  Where are the jobs?




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