Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Cognitive Dissonance

From Washington Whispers in U.S. News & World Report:
Jesse Jackson isn't the only activist that can use corporate boycotts for political purposes. Starting next year, the huge Tea Party organizer FreedomWorks will urge supporters to punish huge corporations like General Electric and Johnson and Johnson for backing President Obama's progressive agenda.

In an exclusive review for Whispers of their plan, FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe says: "Tea Party activists are willing to tackle progressive CEOs just as they tackled progressive politicians. Judging by the results of the midterm elections, progressive CEOs should buckle up, because Tea Party activists are going to give them a very bumpy ride."
This is all to the good. Corporate welfare, whatever its form, is more damaging to the national fisc than that for individuals (it is telling the most heinous villains in Ayn Rand's novels are rent-seeking corporate chieftains). It is high time captains of industry, the putative champions of free markets, are called out for sticking their hypocritical snouts in the public trough.

An additional benefit in calling for corporate boycotts is it further flummoxes the left which, in its unceasing creation of cardboard cutout villains in order to tear them down, has yet to get a full grasp on Tea Party libertarianism. What will the Kos Kidz or moveon.organizers do when there is nationwide call to boycott General Electric or Johnson and Johnson? They can hardly opposed such an action but they can hardly defend those evil corporations either without placing themselves on the same side of those they accuse of being corporate tools and stooges. The internal conflict will surely be excruciating; what fun!

2 comments:

banishedchildofeve said...

Boycott is an Irish invention. Maybe that's why it so rarely works.

The Bovina Bloviator said...

Ay, but you'll have a grand time paradin' about an' tootin' the horns!