Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie Got Massive Aid on His Road to Success; Now Wants to Destroy Government Help For Everyone Else

The “I Got Mine, Now You Don’t Get Yours” Mentality of Radical Conservatives

The Wall Street Journal has an extensive profile of recently elected Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky.  The Republican freshman has gone to Washington with the goal of destroying any and all federal programs that aid those unlike himself who have not been fortunate enough to have been given a great deal of help towards their success in life.

Rep. Massie, the poster child for those
who want to deny government benefits
to everyone but themselves and their
wealthy friends

Mr. Massie, 42 years old, represents a potent strain of small-government conservatism. He and his colleagues, unlike some of their predecessors, didn't come to Washington content to trim government. Instead, they believe wide swaths of what government does need to be reconsidered from the ground up to deal with deficits and a potential explosion in entitlement spending,

Now Mr. Massie has done very well for himself since leaving college.

At MIT, the couple started a company in their apartment to sell a virtual-reality computer technology Mr. Massie created, using some of the 24 patents he developed.

In 2003, after building the company to a 60-person team that raised $30 million from investors, the Massies sold their stake and moved back to Kentucky to raise their four children on the farm where Rhonda Massie grew up. Mr. Massie's father, a beer distributor, and his mother, a nurse, still live in Mr. Massie's childhood home, about 15 miles away in Vanceburg, Ky.

And how did a relatively low income family afford to send their son to MIT?  Well a huge amount of help of course.

He and his wife, Rhonda, grew up in Lewis County, Ky., population 13,870. They left after high school to attend MIT, where Mr. Massie, with the help of scholarships and financial aid, earned degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering, as well as the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, known as the Oscar for inventors.

So no, Mr. Massie is not a self-made person, he didn’t do it all by himself, he had tremendous help in the form of scholarships and financial aid. 

So what drove Mr. Massie into politics?  Well this very wealthy member of the 1% was confronted with a local issue that would have cost him a huge amount of money.

Mr. Massie said he began reading the Lewis County Leader, a local newspaper, where he learned county officials had proposed a levy to build a government office to lure a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Mr. Massie, who estimated the levy would have cost him $100, wrote letters to the newspaper and staged a protest that drew 150 opponents.

Yeah, the man with the MIT degree who drives an $80,000 Tesla was furious about a government program that would have cost him $100.00.  Question:  Did he have to take lessons in being selfish or was he born that way?

And what about his run for Congress, how was that funded?

He won over college student John Ramsey, who had given $3 million of his inheritance to build a group that backs free-market, small-government conservatives in the mold of former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul. The group, Liberty for All PAC, spent more than $640,000 on Mr. Massie's behalf, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks political donations.

Oh, he got $640,000 from a gentleman who got his money from an inheritance and is using it to back programs that would keep everyone else who does not have access to a $3 million + inheritance from ever having the opportunity to have that kind of money.  And the really sad part, Kentucky is a relatively poor area, there are signficant nutrition issues in large parts of the states, the coal industry is dying a natural death and those communities will need substantial government help to adjust, the University of Kentucky is largely an academic joke and a basketball factory and millions in Kentucky rely on government aid to lead decent lives.  Government is not the enemy of Kentucky, Mr. Massie and his cohorts are.

It will be interesting to see if future research and studies can ever determine what it is that drives people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to recognize that their massive amounts of wealth should be used to help others who are just not as fortunate, not as endowed and not as lucky as they were, and what drives people like Mr. Massie to use every effort to destroy the hopes and aspirations and even a decent life style of the large amount of the U. S. population that did not get a scholarship to MIT.  There may be no explanation, people like Mr. Massie and his ilk may be beyond understanding of even the most intensive research.