Rush Limbaugh is almost there. After 22 years of broadcasting and achieving first place in the number of listeners among all radio talk show hosts in spite of a shaky early career, he’s just about arrived in the end zone, philosophically speaking, if I may employ his favorite sport for the metaphor.
He has just one barrier to hurtle before arriving at the very top, for he has successfully taken the really big leap to go from the importance he was to the nation and even the world, to standing tall among all his peers, leaving them hopelessly in the dust.
Limbaugh was the host who made very bright people want to make excuses to step out of the office for any believable reason, just so they could sit in their cars and turn on the radio for even so little as five minutes of his program. He was always bright, entertaining, knowledgeable, informative, and nearly always correct in specifics. He has been amazing in his ability to essentially ad lib his way through three entertaining hours every day
But he had one glaring deficiency. Oh, the modern liberals hated his guts for being mostly right in economics and other social issues. And he used the tool of most conservatives, that of the invoking of religion to ice his arguments when he felt it necessary, but he was amazingly strong on individual rights and the abstract idea that capitalism actually works (I say abstract because while he saw the empirical evidence of capitalism’s efficacy, he never quite grasped the crucial philosophic premises underpinning capitalism as the only moral social system. Then he finally read Ayn Rand; in particular, Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus defining for us the morality of capitalism as the one and only moral social system.
In the minds of a man or of an entire nation, when given the choice, morality will trump practicality. Thus a conservative may know what works for the economy at the practical level, but if he feels it’s immoral, he will vote against the practical. Rush comes close to the finish line in an argument, but often loses because his opponent, the modern liberal, is dealing from what both he and Rush assume is the morally proper – the sacrifice of individual liberty and rights to the collective, for the "common good.”
Why? What is the one principle defeating the advocate of capitalism, and what still leaves Rush short of being the effective voice he could be? That philosophic principle is ALTRUISM, which says man should live his life in eternal sacrifice for others. What one does for himself is the bad. What he does for others is the good. Functionally this would not be a problem if it just involved “me sacrificing to you,” for that’s a personal choice. But when it involves me expecting that “you sacrifice to me,” it takes on a darker meaning.
But worst of all, if it means me voting for “him to take away from them,” that becomes an entire nation drowning in an orgy of forced sacrifice for “the common good.” And it describes exactly what Obama and his administration is trying to do.
Rush seems to understand all this in his public pronouncements, but altruism is ingrained in him at the subconscious level, embedded in his spsyche by the religious indoctrination in his past. You can't be a card carrying Christian without being an altuist and accepting altruism's code of sacrifice. Rush hould take the high ground, and learn how to validate capitalism as the only moral social system. I suggest that he re-read Atlas Shrugged; it will carry him far beyond the primitive grasp he has of it now. It could establish him as one of liberty’s greatest champions.
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