The Compravotantes -- The Vote Buyers

Ayn Rand wrote a stunning nonfictional piece on the comprachicos (the child buyers) in 1971. The comprachicos were a 17th century nomadic group in Spain that bought children, horribly disfigured them and then used them as circus freaks to make money.

Ayn used the comprachicos as a metaphor for the New Left's progressivism and its deforming of young American minds in classrooms with moral relativism, obedience and group conformity, thereby assaulting the cognitive faculties and making zombies of children, thereby softening them up for the acceptance of the tyranny of the altruistic Left. (Ayn made some mistakes in her attacks on "free expression" in children, but that's a conversation for another day.)

The comprachicos have expanded their mind-destruction with environmentalism in recent decades, but there's another hideous branch of these parasites feeding on Americans.

The compravotantes. The vote buyers.

The compravotantes are politicians and their backers of the right and left who court the support of interest groups with the promise of wads of cash stolen from hard-working Americans. The interest groups comprise individuals who are willfully poor, lazy, in bad health, or are of a certain skin color, of a certain sex, of a certain age.

As conduits and receptors for the stolen booty, the politicians and their backers become wealthy demigods with supreme power over individuals, as we see in the upward tilted head and smug smile of Barack Obama or the sullen superciliousness and giddy pugnaciousness of Nancy Pelosi.

The victims of the compravotantes are not just those Americans being openly robbed, but also those receiving the booty, who become addicted to apathy, lethargy, entitlement, anger and regular streams of free cash to continue to not pursue virtue and value. They become ever more psychologically corrupt, ever more the pawns of the compravotantes, ever more demanding of the slavery of their moral betters who wish only to be left alone, and ever more insistent of more power in the hands of the compravotantes.

The compravotantes gladly abide as they buy their souls, helping to create hideous humans who pleasurefully mock those they steal from with condescending looks at grocery stores, with shouts of "racist" or "sexist" or "insensitive" or "selfish" or "rich bastard" or "corporate chieftain" or "not a group player" or "egotist," with demands for even more money for ever more conditions of the "less fortunate."

The compravotantes took their macabre game to a new level on Sunday evening (a day that will live in infamy), as the U.S. House of Representatives (I dare you not to cynically laugh as you speak that name) voted a virtual takeover of humans' health in the United States of America (I dare you not to become anxious in speaking that name).

The compravotantes care not a wit about humans, much less human health. If they did, they would withdraw to chambers, eradicate every piece of Leftist legislation in the last 130 years and then become invisible to the public eye. They care only about power -- coercive power. Or, as Ayn called it, pull.

They court the detritus of America and use it as flesh-pile to smother individuals who dare to live in liberty, to earn their own way, to be happy in their egoism, to pursue their dreams unencumbered. In turn, the flesh-pile of sordid and grotesque psyches trudge to the ballot box with smirks and irrational chips on their shoulders anticipating revenge upon those more "privileged."

And then they are repaid in full for their complicit deceit. With the new legislation outlawing free commerce in one's health, they will get free dialysis, more free prescriptions, free visits to hospitals, free service from health professionals -- while once-free individuals work diligently in a nearby office with a government gun to their temple and an agent demanding, "Work harder! We need more cash!"

The compravotantes are smiling now. They are throwing parties. They laugh into the TV cameras. They shake hands and pat backs. They have won.

Or ... they think they have won. It is a Pyrrhic victory. Being corrupt, they have the disease of the corrupt: the underestimation of the moral, the miscalculation of the certitude and fight of the virtuous. They have won a battle but will lose the war.

They will, in a decade or two or three, be relegated to do the thing they despise the most: work. They will have to work and sweat for a living -- without the rush of powerlust, without the luxury of coerced booty in their wallets and purses, without the sly grin of knowing someone else must work with a gun to his head.

They won't know it immediately, but they will earn back some of their self-esteem. After I and millions of my friends in objectivity imprison the politicians, chase off their malicious minions and establish and ordain individual rights in a new and glorious America, we will be free -- for the first time in history, be free -- and the compravotantes and comprachicos will be deceased.