Who are the takers?

A fundamental belief of today's wealthy corporate Republicans is that they are deserving and no one else is.

They can take, take, take from the commonweal:

[Mitt] Romney, ignoring the fact that he has echoed this same sentiment on multiple occasions, organized 24 “We Did Build This” events in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia, Ohio, Iowa, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Nevada. At each event, local business owners are speaking about their self-sufficiency in running a business and how government is hindering their growth.

But, like the New Hampshire business owner showcased in Romney’s attack ad on the issue, many of these business owners have received significant support from the government, a ThinkProgress analysis finds.

But no one else deserves this sort of help. They're all slackers who can't pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

These Republicans can't even grasp their own selfish double-standard. They invented the Internet, dammit, not the government, not that fat Al Gore guy who tried to steal credit.

It's important to understand the history of the Internet because it's too often wrongly cited to justify big government. It's also important to recognize that building great technology businesses requires both innovation and the skills to bring innovations to market. As the contrast between Xerox and Apple shows, few business leaders succeed in this challenge. Those who do—not the government—deserve the credit for making it happen.

Hard to imagine anyone more thoroughly missing the point without trying to, but then he was editorializing for the Wall Street Journal. Until it's monetized, it doesn't exist. What a strange epistemological idea!

Republicans believe that whoever exploits a resource, infrastructure, an externality, or the gullibility of the public should get all the rewards and the credit.

Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown (R-whatever you need Mitch) shows the problem in more plebeian terms. He had a rough childhood, abandoned by his father, and his mother spend time on welfare, which Scott made her eligible for. Now, however, Brown has money, success, and the gift of forgetfulness. He wants to deny any such help to people like him. I guess they're just not handsome enough to deserve it.

Where I grew up, we called this gittin' above your raisin', and it was a mortal sin for a politician.

Nowadays, though, merely driving a gimmicky pick-up truck and wearing a barn coat every election season is enough to remain a regular guy, never mind that you spend you entire career ardently defending the self-proclaimed right of the wealthy to be taxed and regulated at very low historical rates.

Who feels entitled? Who takes without giving back? Who votes out of selfishness?

Not the middle class, that's for sure.

Update: The wealthy not only don't want to pay, they want to get refunds that make their tax rate negative.