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First meme: “Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and conservative commentators are directly responsible for the murder spree in Arizona.”

Second meme: “Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and conservative commentators had a strong direct influence on the right-wing nut who pulled the trigger.”

Third meme: “Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, and conservative commentators are responsible for creating a climate of hate that inspires acts of violence against public servants.”

I expect that over the next two or three days, we’ll see yet another pivot along the lines of “Sarah Palin’s very existence is akin to a cry for violent revolution against elected officials” or “The Tea Party should be outlawed so as to bring some civility again to American politics” or “Conservative commentators need to be banned from the airwaves so that their vile proclamations can’t poison the minds of sane, forward-thinking people.” Think I’m exaggerating? When prominent Democrats are referring to the murders in Arizona as “an opportunity to [...]  build a closer emotional connection with the middle of the electorate” and a chance to “deftly pin this on the tea partiers,” hyperbole becomes more and more difficult to measure.

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I’ve seen some people seething over the potential extension of the so-called “Bush tax cuts.” The crux of their anger seems to be the mistaken belief this extension is nothing more than a tax cut for millionaires. Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with this interpretation of legislative and economic reality.

First, this extension is not confined to millionaires. In fact, it spares all Americans from a potentially crippling tax hike hitting in the middle of a recessionary period. To imply that this extension is aimed solely at millionaires is simply disingenuous.

Second, this extension is not a tax cut. It simply maintains the current tax rate across the board, rather than implementing tax hikes. In essence, it’s a tax freeze, and no more a tax cut than a spending freeze is a spending cut. No one is about to see their taxes decrease as a result of this extension, millionaires included.

So why all the fuss? If the status quo is being maintained, if no one is seeing their taxes increase, if no one’s share of the pie is about to devoured, then why are some people so upset about this development?

It can’t be because they feel the need to raise revenue for the government. After all, this government has not only embraced deficit spending, it’s courted, married, and settled down in the suburbs with it. The government has spent far, far more than it could ever hope to raise by taxing the rich, so why bother?

It can’t be because they think that raising taxes on revenue generators will spark an economic recovery. Tax hikes by their very nature discourage investment and curb the prospects of an economic recovery. Anyone who claims that raising taxes will inspire growth has failed to conceptually understand growth.

In fact, there’s only one way to justify rage over the absence of a tax hike: class warfare. Some people, convinced of the inherent immorality of the economically successful, are continually searching for ways to punish them in the name of “fairness.” To them, just as the absence of a tax hike is a tax cut, so too is the absence of punishment a reward.

The campaign against the “tax cuts for millionaires” is just another chapter in an old story, in which government attempts to wrest influence from the market in order to impose its own vision of fairness on us all.

In less than two weeks, David Fincher will release his newest film, The Social Network, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Although I originally had little interest in the project, owing primary to my somewhat nebulous relationship to Facebook as a platform (as previously discussed in the June 28, 2010 post entitled “On Twitter, Facebook, and Communication Habits“), clever marketing and positive word of mouth have slowly raised my enthusiasm level, and I now fully intend to be in line on opening night. Once I’ve seen the film, I’ll post a review here elaborating on these thoughts, but I think it’s worth putting this out here now.

A figure like Mark Zuckerberg is never going to be understood or properly appreciated in his lifetime. Zuckerberg, like Gates, Jobs, and other tech titans before him, has fundamentally redefined the way human beings communicate with one another. Regardless of what one thinks of Facebook in its present form, its founding may one day be looked back on as a defining event in human history, and a genuinely revolutionary moment.

The romantic notion of a revolutionary has always struck me as being fundamentally flawed. The word itself conjures images of guerilla fighters, underground warriors, rebels – small, nameless men of nebulous ethos who often fight losing battles but are remembered by history for fighting at all. The world’ most famous revolutionary in the modern sense of the world – Che Guevara – is more recognized now as an icon than a man, his face sold on t-shirts as a brand in defiance of the ideology he preached. To be a revolutionary in this sense is to be a failed revolutionary.

Who are the successful revolutionaries of our modern age? They’re the Mark Zuckerbergs, the Steve Jobses, the Bill Gateses, the Sergey Brins, the Michael Bloombergs, the Jack Dorseys. They’ve done more to shape lives than anyone gives them credit, because when most look at them, yet we write them off as simple executives, too locked into our own conception of what is and isn’t revolution to recognize the real thing when we see it.

The difference between Keynes and Hayek is that Keynes’s theories were primarily concerned with providing politicians cover for expanding government control of the economy, whereas Hayek’s were concerned with explaining how things work.

Does that headline seem a little overblown? Well, don’t worry, it’s not from me. But it’s entirely possible that in the wake of Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts’s special election to fill the Senate seat left vacant following Ted Kennedy’s death, you’ve seen a few similar headlines around the blogosphere. I know I have.  Not shockingly, they’re all from liberals.  Now I’m not going to say that liberals shouldn’t be upset about the Brown victory. After all, if you subscribe to that particular political philosophy, then Brown’s election is a stinging rebuke, and will almost certainly derail the “progressive agenda” for the time being.  That’s a hard pill for some people to swallow.  However, I think that a little perspective is needed.

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