I'm a political junkie... have been all my life. My first vote was cast in the McGovern/Nixon election in 1972. Being a screaming, left-wing, liberal, pinko commie, of course I voted for McGovern. 'Twas a mistake. Because, one day I grew up and realized that when somebody forces me to give my money to other people when I'd rather not, that's called robbery. Oh, I didn't (and don't) mind supporting community improvement activities like roads and hospitals and police and the military and public schools (though there is some question as to whether public schools actually improve the community they supposedly serve... but that's for another paragraph at another time) I began to realize that all those little numbers on my pay stub represented actual, real, spendable money. And as I examined more closely exactly what my money was being taken from me to do, that was my great EUREKA moment. Feeding starving people who can't seem to find any kind of job AT ALL while I'm waitressing and my husband is loading boxes in a warehouse, supporting the children of women who are too stupid to keep their knees together, providing housing for people who then sit in front of their TVs all day and teach their children and grandchildren to do exactly the same thing, supporting illegal immigrants who haven't seemed to learn to stand in line and wait their turn at the front door, conferring publicly financed contracts on companies simply because their CEOs are minorities or females... never mind that they are three times higher than the next highest bid to do the work (ah, how sweet that we have so much tax money {read "my money and your money"} available to rectify all the wrongs perpetrated by mankind, even if we were not the perpetrators and, good grief, not even born!! Collective guilt is such a useful tool, isn't it? In any case, these realizations took me into the dark and sinister realms of ... gasp... conservatism. I began to understand that very few people in life fail because of someone else. They fail primarily because of their own dim, witless, short-sighted decisions. They choose not to stay in school and learn something. They choose to spend all their money instead of saving any of it, I mean even a dollar a month. They live beyond their means,buying houses they can't afford, cars they can't afford, and have babies they cannot afford. They think the schools are free babysitters so they can go make more money (so they can spend it on stuff they can't afford) instead of rearing their own children, expecting someone else to transmit to their children basic standards of conduct, ethics, and decency for them, even when they themselves have none of these. They come up with lame excuse after lame excuse for why their lives are such a shambles when they themselves are the only reason for their current dismal condition. Conservatism spoke to some of these issues. However, I took the thought process a bit further.What if we (you and I) said, "Okay, no more. No more war on drugs, no more war on the unborn, no more using collective guilt to make us pay to try to fix the lives of people who are responsible for their own circumstances?" And that took me to the netherworld of Libertarianism. So, now, what I say is, "You take care of your business and I'll take care of mine. If I want to help you with my money, then I will. If I decide that your life is a mess because you're an idiot, then I won't. You get the same right to decide who you will help and who you won't." What could be fairer? So now it's a political year with a lot of people squabbling over what to do with our money and not, frankly, asking us for much input. That kind of bothers me and I hope it does you, too.
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