A blogger named Christopher Carr (at a site called League of Ordinary Gentlemen – a blog name that I somewhat dislike, by the way, because citing it makes me feel like I'm on a street corner handing out ads for a strip club) is refuting some ideas he ran across on another blog by someone named Dr Helen. The level of writing and the way he manages the ideas is spectacular.
He uses the term "scrooge mcduckery" to describe the sort of wannabe-John-Galtism that seems to underlie some portion of the teapartiers. Here's a great extended quote from the specific blog entry:
Going through the comments over there at Dr. Helen’s and measuring the levels of entitlement, uncompromising self-righteousness, baseless notions of victimhood, and B-team Scrooge McDuckery might be an appropriate exercise for Introduction to Physics students. As if the baby boomers haven’t already been doing this in spirit for years, advocates of going Galt suggest the appropriate response to the democratic government not doing exactly what you-the-one-citizen-among-many like is to sit back and be pampered, as if the baby boomers haven’t already been doing this in spirit for years.
[broken link! FIXME] Actually it's all a sort of prologue to a paean to Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, and, having never been much of a fan of Hugo, myself, I stopped reading it. But the introductory part really captures quite well a lot of what's caused me, in recent years, to turn rather leftward from my earlier infatuation with Ayn Randian ideations.
Even five years ago I still happily described myself as having strong libertarian tendencies, but I've become so uncomfortable with these tendencies in recent times that I cannot in good conscience use the word libertarian any more – at least about myself, anyway. Perhaps these years in communitarian Korea, where even the hard-right conservatives still believe in things like universal healthcare and massive government-funded infrastructure projects, has colored my worldview.
I'm not really going anywhere with this, but I so loved Carr's use of the term "scrooge mcduckery" (and by the way, I loved Scrooge McDuck comics when I a kid – why?). So I had to post this comment.