I am not sure I understand the sentiments you two are expressing. Frankly, I have been around a few decades now myself, and I have never seen such a period of economic prosperity, opportunity, and freedom to be whatever your talents might enable you to be. I thank heaven every day that I live in America at this time in history, and I believe that anyone in this land of abundance who goes around grousing could not be content under any circumstances. So much of the world still does live with poverty, disease, or deadly war as a daily reality that any complaints I have about things like my capital gains taxes being too high seem so petty and trivial, even absurd.
I have worked among the poor, people on disability or welfare, and I can tell you that you would not want to trade places with 99% of these people. This is especially true of the legitimately disabled who are given just enough money to starve on. There is a small sliver of people who prefer this type of life. In my experience, this group is very small. The rest are miserable, and would be working and productive if not ill, either physically or mentally.
I do not see where the U.S. has created a dependant class. Unemployment is so low that Mr. Greenspan has nightmares that such dangerous "full employment" will spark inflation. People will work if there are jobs. The full employment menace which we fear demonstrates this.
There are some things government must do to help the most unfortunate because private charity is inadequate. Health care is one of those things all must have access to, and a case can be made for this on purely selfish grounds--as one observer of New York's Lower East Side said nearly a century ago: "It would be of little concern to the uptown gentry that the children here are tubercular or polio-stricken, except that these maladies are no respecters of wealth, and once unleashed spread among the rich as well as the poor." Thus, early children's hospitals were established, motivated in equal part by mercy and fear.
All must have access to health care. All children must eat, be clothed, be warmed in the winter, and be schooled. I do not think these are weak-brained liberal notions, but things we must do to preserve a free and safe society. (By the way, universal health care is a bogeyman. We already have it: I have it in my doctor's office, the poor in the emergency rooms which have been converted into front line medical and dental clinics).
I may be missing something here, but I find too many of those who have the leisure to sit around and debate the great and trivial issues of the day on Internet message boards to be strangely irritable and ungrateful for the privileges they enjoy; privileges which could only be dreamt of by 99.99% of the people who have lived in this world before us, and many billions who live in it today. |
