This whole makers vs. takers meme is about to make my head explode. I have made no secret of the fact that when I was 25 years old, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I went through a very bad time in my life when I was diagnosed. I lost everything ... my job, my self-esteem, my sanity in many respects. I was pumped full of drugs and became a vegetable. All I did all day was watch television and make elaborate cross-stitch pieces.
Ever since Paul Ryan was nominated as the vice presidential candidate on Romney's ticket, there has been a lot written about Ayn Rand's philosophy, but I have to confess that it was reading The Fountainhead that helped me to emerge from my vegetative state. Whatever you may think about Rand's overall philosophy, the book is the story of Howard Roark, an architect with creative vision. I'm not sure exactly what it was about the story that pulled me out of my slump, but after I read it, I was able to find my self-esteem again and start rebuilding my life.
When I started building my website back in 2000, I joined a forum about affiliate marketing. Others there warned never to reveal the url of my website or else parasitic people would still my ideas and copy them. That always seemed silly to me because the one thing I have is confidence in my abilities. If somebody steals my ideas, well shame on them. They're never going to catch up to me because by the time they've finished implementing what they've stolen from me, I've already come up with more ideas and am well on my way or already finished implementing them.
Here's the thing that is making my head explode over the makers vs. takers meme, and it comes from the storyline in The Fountainhead, though I can't give you direct correlations right now because I'd have to go back and reread the book to provide exact comparisons. It's more of what I took from the book when I read it thirty years ago, and that is that Mitt Romney is a parasite.
Mitt Romney built his fortune in venture capitalism. He took businesses that other people built, he invested very little of his own money, borrowed heavily against the assets of the businesses weighing them down with debt, and in many cases drove those businesses into bankruptcy. Mitt Romney always walked away with millions of dollars.
I've held many jobs working for businesses over the years before the website I built finally enabled me to quit working for other people. When I did work for other people, many of my brilliant ideas helped their businesses grow and flourish. I was usually a part of a team of people who cared about the success of the business who worked together. Now, every once in a while there would be a co-worker who was lazy and didn't pull his/her share of the load. But for the most part everybody took pride in the work they did.
I never worked at a business that was taken over by a company like Bain Capital. But it doesn't take much imagination to understand how I would have felt if somebody like Mitt Romney took over the business I helped to build and destroyed it, leaving my friends and coworkers without a job, health insurance or a pension. They were the true makers, while Mitt Romney was the taker. Not only did he destroy the business, he destroyed the lives of so many people who had dedicated their lives to helping that business grow. If Mitt Romney was a character in one of Ayn Rand's books, she would have described him as a parasite.
The other meme that makes my head want to explode is this business of the "job creators" needing more tax breaks. Give me a break! The people that are already sitting on piles of cash aren't creating jobs now. Lowering their taxes further isn't going to make them want to go out and create more jobs. Seriously? They have all these millions of dollars that they are pumping into Mitt Romney's campaign to get him elected president so they can save more in taxes to hire more people? Who falls for this crap? I don't understand how anybody who makes $50,000 year can watch that tape of Mitt Romney standing before a room full of people who each paid $50,000 for the privilege of seeing him talk, can believe that this man is their savior.