Do big-government types never tire of using children, the elderly and the disabled as human shields?
Let’s annoy them by thinking about it: Almost every policy they favor purportedly aims to protect “the most vulnerable among us.” As a principle, that suits both conservatives and liberals, because we’re all willing to help people who are hurting through no fault of their own. Heck, most of us will help people who are to blame for their troubles if they’ll start showing a little gumption.
But the redistributionist’s goal isn’t so much to help others as to separate the rich (and “the rich”) from their money on the assumption that unequal income is automatic proof of oppression, racism – the usual. So he exploits our noble impulses to get us to “help” busloads of people who are anything but vulnerable.
Today, a little over a year after ObamaCare became one of the most detested laws of the land, try to recall any congressional hearings on it where the witnesses were able-bodied, reasonably bright 30-somethings who were willingly unemployed and who acknowledged their sense of entitlement to the fruits of other people’s labor.
I’ll wait.
No such witnesses materialized, of course, because the shiftless are of slim value in sob stories, and socialists find it tough to see people as individuals rather than as useful symbols of class, ethnicity, what have you. They don’t want us particularly mindful of people who could work – or buy medical insurance – but won’t. Instead, when there is any suggestion that we not continue to grow government at the supersonic speed to which recipients of a taxpayer-funded sustenance are accustomed, we are peppered with images of sympathetic figures. This manipulates our compassion in order to prop up programs whose benefits long since metastasized to populations far beyond the genuinely afflicted.
In a tactic ripe with cynicism, this is labeled “putting a human face” on those programs. You’ll note that faces are painstakingly denied to humans who suffer from, say, job creation that never takes place because trillions of dollars were diverted from the private sector to government.
But even as good manners prevent us from breaking the wrists of those who pick our pockets for one “vital program” after another, we are neither altogether stupid nor completely blind.
We have misgivings when not only those who have been reduced to mascot status – children, the elderly and the disabled – but also the physically and mentally fit live in public housing for years. We recall hard times growing up when our families learned to cut back. We meet people from starkly disadvantaged backgrounds who refused to let that chart their lives and made something of themselves. We see laid-off friends taking jobs that others would consider beneath their station in life.
More than a decade ago, I started working with foreigners who had come to the United States (legally). Some had the advantages of an education. Some didn’t. Some arrived with a little money. Some had barely more than the clothes on their back. Some spoke English. Some didn’t know a lot beyond “Hello.” (Though I promptly introduced them to “Howdy.”)
But in virtually every case, they seized opportunity – namely by going to work doing whatever jobs they could find. They did this in good times and recession alike. And in a matter of years or even months, they economically surpassed some native-born Americans whose reliance on government is now so thorough that they scarcely feel a need to make excuses for not working. (The film “Precious” – no right-wing creation – distills the agony and insanity of an entitlement mindset left unchecked.)
While bitterness is the wrong response to such contradictions, it’s hard to watch the cigarette-puffing, well-dressed “needy” coolly devour the output of the 40- and 50-hour workweeks of the worn-out “rich.” Yet we’re told it’s vicious to inquire into such matters. The rebuke varies, but it boils down to, “Shut up and toil – and make with the taxes.”
That pressure to self-censor makes no sense if the real objective is to protect vulnerable populations. Most of us want to do that. But if your ambition is to relieve people of their earnings, it makes perfect sense to silence debate. You don’t achieve such a goal by admitting it is the goal. You do it by dishonestly making the truly helpless the face of your activism. You spotlight a 91-year-old wheelchair user, whom everybody wants to help, but not the 21-year-old crouching behind him who has a taste for video games and Hot Pockets – and who cannot imagine a world so cruel that it would ask him to reduce his Facebook time by 20, much less 40, hours per week.
Happily for him, he need not imagine such a world. Society is unwilling – so far – to do the necessary baby-from-bath-water separation. We’re not quite ready to utter to those who really need to hear it that most politically incorrect of all admonitions: Get a job.
Whew!
Sure glad Coolidge Park is a gun-free zone.
To reach Steve Barrett, call 423-757-6329 or e-mail sbarrett@timesfreepress.com.