Sara Robinson, Visions editor at Alternet, lays down the Galtlet. A recent NYT piece reported a fact that many of us know already: blue states pay more into the federal treasury than they get back; red states, Mother Jones observes, take more money from Washington than they put in.

Progressives believe in the redistribution of wealth, so we’re not usually too upset by this state of affairs. That’s what it means to be one country. E pluribus unum, and all that. We’re happy to help, because we think we’ve got a stake in making sure kids in rural Alabama get educations and seniors in Arizona get healthcare. What’s good for them is good for all of us. We also like to think they’d help us out if our positions were reversed. It’s an investment in making America stronger, and we feel fine about that.

It’s not that blue staters resent helping out, writes Robinson, it’s the pissing and moaning from the self-righteous states Ayn Rand herself would describe as “parasites.”

So we’ve got every right to get good and angry about the fact that, by and large, the people who are getting our money are so damned ungrateful — not to mention so ridiculously eager to spend it on stuff we don’t approve of. We didn’t ship them our hard-earned tax dollars to see them squandered on worse-than-useless abstinence-only education, textbooks that teach creationism, crisis-pregnancy misinformation centers, subsidies for GMO crops and oil companies, and so on. And we sure as hell didn’t expect to be rewarded for our productivity and generosity with a rising tide of spittle-flecked insanity about how we’re just a bunch of immoral, godless, drug-soaked, sex-crazed, evil America-hating traitors who can’t wait to hand the country over to the Islamists and the Communists.

Robinson suggests that blue staters Go Galt and let the by-your-own-bootstraps crowd pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and take responsibility for everything from the free-market viability of their farm products to their children’s competitiveness in the job market.

We realize some of you aren’t too keen on public schools. It’s great that you want to take on more personal responsibility for educating your own kids. Just be warned: if you don’t teach them real science and real history — including evolution, climate change and the actual contents of the US Constitution — we’re probably not going to hire them. So we hope you’re also ready to take responsibility for that, too, which will probably mean supporting your grown kids in your basement until you die.

Made me laugh out loud several times. Enjoy.