Media girl writes a post "Go along, because you can't win" and in it she quotes,roseeriter who decries an attitude that

You are a burden on America.

Burden. Yes. An interesting choice of words.

Define "burden."

Define "America," or is it "Amerika," as we said during the anti-War Movement.

Exactly what is the "burden?" The reason it is a "burden" to help a baby who needs health care is because the American economy is tanking. America is on a spending spree on a war it can't afford and so to win the war against Sadam and his yet-to-be-found weapons of mass destruction, WMD, Americans have to cut out social services.

Yet, I have to ask, why was this Republic formed? So we can go on foreign adventures? Some of the more forthright Neo-cons admit that they believe the oil in the Middle East is America's oil and it belongs to...what?...America?

To get the price of oil down and to seize the reserves, America has invaded and occupied Iraq--not big news there. But what is the burden? Who pays for this expansionism? Who benefits?

Debora Spar in her [url=http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=2515&t=innovation>[b]Ruling the Waves[/url] and my early essay on Media Girl A View from Partenia recalls the California Gold Rush of 1849. Men came to find gold and they staked out land. But there always was the specter of claim jumpers who would steal the gold.

And it was inefficient for the miner to sit around with a shotgun, guarding the mine. You can't get much mining done that way. You had to hire guards. In fact, why not have "law and order," a great concept that I recall Richard Nixon used to speak about, and get the tax payers to pay for guarding the miner's claim. So, according to Spar's thesis, it is the businesses themselves who ask for government intervention to deal with guarding their gold, and as Jed Clampett found out, "gold" can be black.

So, who pays for guarding the claim of the gold miners? The tax payer! And since the taxes are now going to guard the claim, who can be burdened with caring for the ailing baby? The baby burden is too much.

America's agenda is now the corporate agenda. "What's good for General Motors is good for America," as the fractured quote goes. "What's good for Halliburton is good for Halliburton," and so long as those pesky tax payers foot the bill for America's latest claim jumping, maybe some social services should be sacrificed.

The ironic thing is that those who are the most irate about spending on the poor have not connected that the money is running dry because they are spending on the rich.

In the end, Marx may well be proved right by the Right.