Read Romney’s new statement.

What a fucking copout. Wealth Creators are Special Snowflakes: Global Freedom Edition.

Every civilization with a monetized economy, ever, has had some people who’ve achieved wealth. Emphasis on some people. It’s not an index of freedom. For the few to gain wealth has never, ever been about freedom, and quite often has been about the opposite: slaves, serfs, colonies…. There’s a lot of wealthy people in the world who live in countries where you’re poor, you’re super rich, or you’re in the servicer class that looks after the super rich.

What has made a few nations in the modern world stand out is fostering a middle class: allowing it to grow because of a governmental system and ideological underpinnings that keep all the power from being cornered by a tiny number of folks with all the influence and the purchasing power. Everything from basic civil liberties to guaranteed education to infrastructure development give the not-rich remainder opportunities that would otherwise be unobtainable.

The Founding Fathers neither revolted against England nor formed this nation’s intellectual core in opposition to the abstract construct of “government.” They specifically opposed a governmental system in which the soft power of class and affiliation were interwoven with hard power.

Romney keeps on talking up policy wherein the government is supposed to let some people and institutions be “more free”—of taxes, of regulations—so that they can provide jobs and opportunities for the rest of us. It’s fucking feudalism by another name, corporate noblesse oblige as policy. For him to try and float this as the end result of a drive for freedom just makes me ill.