In the Covid-19 plagued world, rightists keep bashing gov't. While seeking more taxpayer money.

Right-wingers like to yammer about big government and socialism.

With their fingers on one hand crossed behind their backs, and the other hand out, palm up - or heading for you wallet.

Which is why honest assessments of the world we now live in should include permanently ash-canning two conservative canards while revealing their hypocrisies and greed.

* The first right-wing myth needing dismissal is that everything will run like clockwork if we'd just put private sector people in charge.

Well, right now we have the private sector's self-proclaimed best deal maker in the world sitting in a privatized White House stuffed with a cabinet full of big-business billionaires like Betsy Devos and Wilbur Ross.

While the country is awash in death, deficits, disease and death - and devastatingly clear-eyed projections about a rudderless, leaderless America - 

Our leaders are guilty of a colossal failure of imagination. The ability to understand what’s truly happening is a prerequisite for devising solutions. Until they begin looking squarely at the daunting reality, the United States has no chance of surmounting this crisis.

- including one outlook offered Sunday by Trump's billionaire banker friend and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin who predicted that already shockingly nightmarish US unemployment numbers are going to rise another 50%. 

And Wisconsin business leaders are still promoting the idea that they know best about how to handle infectious disease - 

In late April, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce proposed a plan to reopen the Wisconsin economy by accounting for conditions in specific counties and a company’s industry

 - while the pandemic's numbers are hammering Wisconsin, nationwide and the world because viruses don't respect lines on a map and Civid-19 is now working its way through an openly lax White House that has discounted the threat from the beginning.

* The second devalued shibboleth which needs retiring is the devoutly-respected  Ronald Reagan bumper-sticker about government being the problem even though events have made that further hollow and irrelevant.

Because right now people have to eat, keep the heat on and maintain their sanity, and it will be government which will best help people navigate around  the evaporation of the assumptions around which their survival has revolved.

So pablum like this from one defeated and increasingly insignificant politician has moved from annoying to useless:

Scott Walker

@ScottWalker

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May 4

Freedom protects people and their human worth. Socialism fails them. “Good luck becoming dependent on the government!” is not how we sign high school yearbooks. By our nature, we want to be free. That‘s why we need more independence from the government, not dependence on it.

And Hat Tip to Dan Bice for helping us to cut through the hollowness of the right's anti-government argument and big business's hypocritical messaging and methods:

Bice: Wisconsin business lobby asks for bailout money for lobbying groups in next round of coronavirus stimulus

The truth is that Walker and his ilk - and let's not forget the experienced hypocrite Ron Johnson - have always distributed, embraced and benefitted from socialism for the already-privileged - including tax breaks to low-interest lending tailored infrastructure to cushy public salaries and benefits that routinely embed inequity from Wall Street to Main Street to Easy Street nationwide with public money for private gain.

Can you say "Foxconn?"

$4.5 billion in taxpayer subsidies. Environmental law rollbacks. Fast-tracked water rights and specially-greased State Supreme Court oversight. Private property confiscation. But please do not call this "socialism."

Call it what you like, but public intervention on a scale not seen since the 1930's will be needed to save the country, but only if Trump is defeated and Walkerite exhortations are unmasked and ignored.