Idle, Idle thoughts, 1.0
We moved to Tampa about one year ago. “About,” because we moved in stages while waiting for our possessions to make their trip south, actually four of them, down from Massachusetts, and during the move we were living off and on in our son’s home in Tampa while the house we had purchased, now just about a year and one half ago, was having a complete face lift plus a second floor addition.
We moved into our home last January, before all the work had been completed, and only now, some 8 months later, benefiting from the cash from refinancing, are we able to finish the work, mostly doing the work ourselves. Anyway, all this to say I’ve had little time for what I like most, reading and writing, and for this Blog.
But idle thoughts are always coming to me. Here are a few from this morning while I was taking a break from building book shelves and reading Michael Harrington’s Socialism interspersed with articles from this week’s Economist Magazine.
Our politicians are not talking about the right things. Rather than backing blanket subsidies for all kinds of needs, for health insurance, home ownership, even jobs, they ought to limit themselves to whether or not the safety net, the proper function of government, is in place is adequate. Do our present programs do enough for those with real needs?
Certainly for some of our citizens we do too much, for the old and affluent, for example, who receive social security payments (admittedly they have paid for these themselves over their working lives), health insurance through medicare, mortgage deductions if they don’t yet own their homes etc. Can we afford to go on doing this?
Whereas for others we don’t do enough, for ex-offenders, the mentally handicapped, the children, more and more of them, of failed families, most of all for the young jobless males a good number of whom are destined to become part of a prison population already numbering some 2 million.
We ought stop talking about such unachievable ends as health care for all, college education for all, home ownership for all — this kind of talk is pure demagoguery because we can’t provide such, and in any case we don’t know how, and we don’t have the resources, and can’t afford it, especially now when we are in an economic depression and waging war at high cost on multiple fronts.
Or in other words governments, our government shouldn’t be in the business of caring for those who can (even if they will not) care for themselves. Just as schools shouldn’t be in the business of teaching those who have no interest in learning.
Why haven’t we learned that we really can’t do much for those who can’t or won’t do for themselves? There are certainly those who merit the government’s help, but in number they do not at all approach the millions, say the 40 million who, as we are told over and over again, are currently without health insurance.
