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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (42056)	6/27/1999 4:15:00 PM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Terrence, if you want to talk about the facts of the period prior to the institution of income tax in America, that would be fine. Can you refute anything I said about widespread child labor, people dying of hunger, the old living extremely grimly if their children were not alive to take care of them, etc? I think not, because this was the reality for most Americans. And the rich got that way mostly by vast and immoral exploitation of our natural resources, and by paying desperate people almost nothing to work at great risk to their health and very lives. Thank goodness we have a reasonably fair system of taxation, and laws to protect workers, because we needed them badly. People did leave other countries to come here. Many of them suffered horrendously, also, and it often took several generations for people who took tremendous risks to ensure the ultimate survival of their gene pools to prosper once they arrived. For example, it was a no brainer for the Irish to come here in the mid-eighteenth century, because millions of them were dying in the Potato Famine. That did not mean that America was a welcoming place for them--it was not. It was simply better than what they left. It does not even mean that America was a particularly good place, period. Life was even harder in parts of Europe during that period. Curiously, however, somehow the western European governments did get the message, and now have much better safety nets for their citizens across the board than we do. Their societies are also significantly less violent. This is a vague platitude--"The U.S. was not the dismal hell you describe. Ha-ha! People all over the world were leaving everything behind to get here -- even their families." Could we move to a fact-based discussion, which I find significantly more interesting?