If you’ve developed an ideology that what’s good for you personally also happens to be good for everyone else, that’s quite wonderful because there’s no moral tension.

Most children develop the theory of mind at a very young age. Clearly, this is what's preventing them from becoming bajillionaires.

“If you’ve developed an ideology that what’s good for you personally also happens to be good for everyone else, that’s quite wonderful because there’s no moral tension.”

Isn’t this exactly where the Liberal ideology on healthcare reform (and every other entitlement program) is?

"CF: There’s a great joke on Wall Street which is that the bet on Romney is Wall Street’s worst bet since the bet on subprime. "

Except that the bet on subprime was WIN/WIN for Wall Street. They got the fees, they got the bonuses, WE got the toxic assets, bail-out costs and foreclosures. Timmeh Geithner refused to follow Obama's instructions to at least look at having the Feds take over Citibank.

Or did Lloyd Blankfein finally get arrested? Until that's in the Morning News, there is no win for us.

Some heroes. They've lead us down the garden path too many times now. But they never seem to suffer with the rest of us when their schemes collapse. There's no future in pandering to the rich.

What @1 said. It's rather odd that our resident 'shoshalist' buys into corporate media's myth building about Obama.

@ 3,

The point of social safety net programs is to help others, even if you don't need the help yourself. For example, it's highly unlikely that I'll need programs that help women and children, like WIC and SNAP, but I'll gladly pay more taxes for them. Helping others is not only the correct moral choice, it benefits our entire society.

It's understandable that's totally beyond your comprehension.

@3 Except that because of, you know, FACTS universal health care actually is good for the vast majority. And I've found this odd thing in a lot of people pulling for change (in the health care system, gay rights, gender equality, etc) - the ability to empathize with those suffering from a plight not their own.

Thanks for this pointer, Charles.

@#3
No, it's really not. The Democratic policy thinkers pushing for healthcare-for-all typically have a good salary and excellent health care benefits, and they expect that under the ACA they will pay for the insurance they're now guaranteed to get. This is fundamentally unlike hedge-fund gazillionaires insisting that their salaries must be taxed as "capital gains" (even though it's not their capital) and for that matter that capital gains must be taxed at a low rate - a rate of 0% in the tax plan of Herman Cain, who was leading in the polls for the Republican nomination a year ago today. That's just a whole different world of self-interested special pleading.

@1: My understanding is that the 1% in the financial industry was almost completely Romney, but the 1% in high tech and other industries trended Obama. I can't remember where I heard it first, though.

@3:

Quite the opposite, I would say. The Liberal Philosophy on matters such as these is more along the lines of: "what's good for the largest group of people is better than what's good for a few individuals, even if that includes myself". Or, as a certain logician would phrase it, "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few - or the one".

It's not that Liberals lack a sense of self-interest, but rather they recognize and accept the premise that there are times when their self-interest should be set aside, if doing so contributes to the greater good.

In the end it comes down to understanding that we do not stand separate and apart from that greater good, and will ultimately benefit from it as well, even if those benefits are not obvious or immediate.

I know that this typo is (sic) from the source, but you've bolded it Charles so you're just as responsible:

we’ve persuaded ourselves that the heroes of our social narrative our businesspeople.

Charles, you might like this piece: The Revolt of the Rich.

@3,
Just repeating what COMTE @12 said.

You've got it backwards. Liberals (generally) believe "what's good for everyone will be good for me too."

@12 He's already dead?

Comments against #3 are just proving the point YGBKM is making. Liberals do not consider that some people view the practice of government redistributing money by force as a source of moral tension.

@17:

I suppose you also therefore consider paying your fair share to drive on freeways, to receive services from first-responders, to get cheap electricity and clean water, to ensure your food is healthy and affordable, and all the other benefits provided by government to taxpayers as "redistribution of money by force", yes?

If so, I kindly suggest you go build a cabin in the woods somewhere far, far away from the rest of us, where you can enjoy your cherished "rugged individualist" lifestyle without any hindrance from the "parasitic" government you apparently find so loathsome.

@19 - The point is simply that any given person's ideal society will be moral from their viewpoint. Charles Mudede would certainly argue Marxism as a moral system. Or when Goldy posts the charts of "red" counties of Washington receiving more tax dollars than they put in and he can't understand why they aren't grateful for that and instead vote against their "self interest". The implication is that Goldy's redistribution world view is the best for everybody but not everybody understands that yet. What if the "red" people really do value self-sufficiency, charity, hard work, and freedom above all else. Is that an immoral way to approach life?

You have to feel for them.

After working so hard to elect the Anti-Christ, Rmoney, their plans to end the world fell short when sensible people chose someone good for the country instead.

@20 - "Is that an immoral way to approach life?"

It wouldn't be immoral if their practice genuinely reflected the values you claim they hold: for example, conformity with the judeo-christian tradition has little to do with freedom, clamoring for cheap gasoline or fertilizer in the age of oil wars has nothing to do with self-sufficiency.

@12:
Another factor is that, in my biased perceptions of my experience, liberals tend to be people who believe that there is no fundamental difference between themselves and people who are very poor and very rich.

It could be easy to go too far in this, putting all success and failure down to chance, but I think we're onto something here, namely that '[...] the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all,' (which were perhaps more accurate as 'can happen').

That is to say, contrary to the language of 'makers' and 'takers', 'creators' and 'moochers', 'workers' and 'parasites', the 'Elect' and the 'Preterite', any of us can be very different things in different times, and could easily have been very different in different circumstances. This marries self-interest to collective interest. (This relates to why racism is so toxic: you can make laws that are terrible for
a group, content in the notion that you will never, ever, be a member of it.)

As to the very wealthy's view of reality's being morally coherent, I've never doubted that for a moment---it's almost tautologically true of human beings that this would be the case, but some humans are also capable of at least occasionally considering that they might be wrong, factually or morally. Only the stupid of any ideology or party believe their opponents to be villains in their own stories---stupid both because it bespeaks real lack of interest in reality and because it can put one at disadvantages both tactical and strategic. (See Sun Tzu.)

@20 The red people - as you call them - may value self-sufficiency, charity, hard work, and freedom (I wouldn't necessarily, by the way), or at least they may say and even think that they do. However, the wealth redistribution scheme the wealthy have been running since Reagan through the Republican Party - they've been waging class warfare for decades now, this selfish looting they can easily justify to themselves - is counter to all those stated red people values. Charity? By taking assistance away from the poor? By confiscating their savings when they become seriously ill? Freedom? To do what the wealthiest demand that you do, and forcing you to live by their self-serving rules? Hard work? Sure, for pennies without benefits or hope of a larger share of that proverbial pie. And self-reliance? If you want real self-reliance and freedom, go live in that cabin in the woods like the Unabomber. And if you accept a dead rabbit from your neighbor five miles away, by the way, you're relying on him. The most practical self-reliance comes as a benefit of economic freedom, and the red people aren't going to get that in a society where you work longer hours for less pay, less benefits, and, rather, for the benefit of more creditors. It's indentured servanthood, in other words. That's Romney's America, and it's the America of the 1%.

An America where Big Government flexes its muscles to help its constituents - the people they're supposed to represent! - comes closest to those red people values you mentioned.

@ 20 AmeriKKKa's rich are totally amoral, so there's no tension for them at all.

Regarding eastern Washington's far-white red-county voters, they're the biggest hypocritical welfare queens and pathological compulsive liars in the state. Same goes for the red states that would instantly collapse if cut-off from the sweet blue state tax dollars from which they mooch off.

But But the left tells me Obama is in bed with this people and they love him.

What O.Andrew @25 said. I have an uncle (via a soon-to-be ex-marriage) who is one of those 1% Wall Street lifer-insiders. He's written numerous WSJ columns. I used to have a lot of respect for the guy, he's no dummy. But it's clear that even though he's worth untold dozens of millions, and is well over 70 now, ALL HE FUCKING CARES ABOUT is keeping his money, and everyone else can just drop dead.

It's that "we built this" bullshit. He came in as a poor immigrant and worked his way up, full credit there. But succeeded on the back of a social, educational, medical, scientific, etc. infrastructure supported by... taxes, for the common weal.

Right-wingers now are just "I've got mine, you lot get fucked". No need to invoke similarly bullshit Marxist nonsense.