Friday, February 19, 2010

Joe Stack’s Frustration is America’s Frustration, Misguided Though it May Be

Joseph Anthony Stack’s intentional death, yesterday, by flying his small airplance into an Austin, Texas building which housed offices of the Internal Revenue Service is big news.  My initial post on this story posited this incident under the heading Joe Stack - Patriot or Terrorist?  It is not an idle speculation.

Billy Beck adroitly posted on this subject under the heading Parsing Guilts And Allegiances, pointing to a Shannon Love comment on a Matt Welch post at Reason.com regarding this event.  Here’s Love’s comment.

Actually, if you read the manifesto, you see that he is not upset at big government itself but that big government never helps him.

He whines and whines about how the government, big business, his accountant, etc in short anyone but him have screwed him over and refused to help. He whines and whines and whines that government helps out everyone BUT him and his grievance isn’t that the government is invasive but that it is not invasive in his favor.

He seemed perfectly happy to feed at the public trough when the military was pumping money into aerospace in southern California and he was pissed off that when the Cold War finished and his gravy train ended that the government didn’t charge in a make everything better.

He bitches that he came to Austin and couldn’t compete against the business that already existed. Bitching that others outcompete you and that the government should make sure you get a fair shot in business is not a libertarian point of view.

This guy never even had a thought about personal responsibility and self-reliance.

He’s not a libertarian/classical-liberal. He’s a greedy little piglet who is angry that the bigger piglets pushed him off the teat he felt his by divine right.

Love’s assertions in the comment, as Billy notes, are quite “perceptive,” but let us not deny the fact that probably ninety percent (90%) of American individuals are not libertarian/classical-liberal individuals.  No, ninety percent (90%) of American individuals are, if not greedy little piglets angry at the bigger piglets, as Love states, they are at a minimum so conditioned to believe that the State, in all its various manifestations, is in existence for their benefit, that it is little wonder that Joe Stack’s last words are lacking any references to self-reliance and personal responsibility.

With that said, let’s move on to Joe Stack’s frustration, which I think is America’s frustration, and is a cause of concern for the current status quo in America.  Scott Brown accidently commented on this frustration yesterday, stating “Senator Brown said he hopes that the pilot’s anger is not connected to frustration he sensed while on the campaign trail.”, this according to Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review’s The Corner.

Americans are frustrated, you can sense it, as Brown noted in his comment.  This frustration may be misguided, or lacking in focus for freedom from the State, but that does not make the frustration any less real or, more importantly, a frustration only afflicting what MSMs would call fringe elements of society, it is mainstream.

Posted by John Venlet on 02/19 at 10:41 AM
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