The Pledge of Subservience

I pledge subservience
To the poor
Of the United States with ObamaCare
And to the collective
For which it stands
No patient
Has to pay
Unless you count taxes
With suffering and sacrifice for all

The Moral Shadow of Glenn Beck

Sometimes the most innocuous of remarks can tell you volumes about what a person thinks.

In this case, it was Glenn Beck, on his show with a panel of doctors. While discussing the cost of health care, Mr. Beck asks what incentive a drug company would have to pour money into research if they were not allowed to profit from their discoveries.

Glenn is absolutely right to ask this question, but in the very next breath, with his usual fervent flair, Mr. Beck tries to fend off criticism of profit:

"What? Do we have Mother Teresa in the drug companies now? ... it [would be] great if we could all be like that..."

Um, what?

With this fleeting utterance, Glenn Beck briefly swings a spotlight past a moral contradiction.

He is trying to support profit-seeking while advocating a non-profit morality.

This is the moral premise that leads, inexorably, to a simple equation: Republicans = Democrats.

If drug companies were, in fact, Mother Teresas as Glenn Beck advocates, they would simply go out of business. No business can operate by giving everything away for free. Apparently, for Glenn Beck, the only way you can make drugs is by cheating on morality.

"it [would be] great if we could all be like that..."

If you really believe that Glenn, do it now. Be like that. Stop the pretense of upholding Mother Teresa as an ideal, and then failing to live up to it. What's that you say - you have a family to provide for? But Glenn! Don't you want your family to be moral too?

The truth is, a world of Mother Teresas would be a horrible world. A world of forsaking pleasure, denying self, and servitude to all.

The purpose of morality should be for making our lives on Earth as good as possible. As long as Republicans accept Mr. Beck's morality of altruism, they will be unable to stop the diminishing of freedom, and the decline of prosperity.

Who can defend capitalism with a morality that damns it?