How did we get here? (Part II)

In my last writing I explored the circumstances that created the political environment we are currently in. At various points of the campaign President Elect Obama stated he was going to fundamentally change America. I think he means that and to a point I believe it has already been done.

In the past the majority of the people would be crushed to accept government support, but today for a percentage of the population it is life as normal. Just fifty years ago divorce and separation were appalling and to be considered a catastrophe. Many now see this as normal.

Why do I mention social issues when I spoke primarily of economics in the previous piece? I do this strictly because they cannot be separated. The Republican party is cutting itself in half trying to carve up the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives. They are deciding who will run the party. This I believe is the heart of the problem not just with their party but with our current society. We have allowed dependence to flourish and with it with commonly accept defeat as normal. I have a particular passion about this because in certain aspects of my life I accept defeat as normal.

The welfare, medicare Social Security act, the alphabet soup of government support all create a level of dependence. I do not undertake to convince people to pull the rug out on all of these all at once. That would be societal suicide . We have allowed through the last few generations to have people's survival skills taken away. Some forms of support I do not even object to. I have great sympathy toward people physically unable to work. While not the only example the best example I can think of is a cancer patient in the final stages of the disease. This person cannot possibly go out to work every day and his/her family cannot begin to cover the medical costs involved. The only other choice is early death with great pain. This is of course not acceptable.
Since I have advocated for some support, who is to decide who gets support and who does not? That is a tricky question. Some of these questions can be answered through health care reform. If medical insurance were 1.) separated from the employer and 2.) paid for primarily by medical savings accounts we would go a long way to deciding this. If the expenditures are brought back into the hands of the patient and the doctor decisions are made on need and resources rather than contractual agreement with a massive HMO with limited competition within the state. John McCain had the beginnings of this plan in his health care plan. The tax credits offered in his plan would be the funding of the medical savings accounts. The savings by increasing co-pay amounts could be applied to catastrophic insurance plans. By increasing the co pay we would cut down on overuse of the system primarily of emergency room use for non-emergencies. Also by making health savings accounts able to stay in the account rather than re-cycling each year, the younger years when smaller amounts of medical costs allows them to be saved for later years when the expenditures are higher.

What brought us here primarily is misplaced compassion or altruism. By the two political parties competing on how many goodies can be given away all under the guise of compassion we have cruelly taken away the survival skills of people on the fringes of society. This also works to take away the most important thing in learning: consequences. When there is little or no risk in engaging in risky activity there is not reason not to do it. This is true whether the activity is investing in sub prime loans, or in engaging in sexual activity as a teen who is not prepared to deal with adult decisions as an adult. When we provide an easier out for this in the form of abortion, or in the case of keeping the child we offer them subsistence living all paid for by the producers of the society. This as I stated before puts government support in competition with productive work. Since government offers an easier way in the short run, it wins out.

Who got us here? More of that in the next piece.

How did we get here?

How on earth did we elect the most liberal candidate for President ever? The opinion pages and sites are full of answers. I think some of them are spot on and some not.

I think we have to go back to the dreaded sixties for the genesis of this. The Lyndon Johnson administration was a landmark administration. I personally think it was a disaster, but history making nonetheless. The difference between the New Deal programs and the Great Society programs were very stark. In the New Deal in the Roosevelt administration while they drastically increased government and took money from producers to give to non-producers, the difference was that they attempted to give a hand up. They attempted to give men and women some pride back by putting them to work. Some of the programs had good results many not. The programs of Johnson for the most part though, gave direct payments. They did not create jobs other than government administration jobs. There are of course exceptions but most of the new programs made government a new source for income for people down on their luck. The government in practice went into competition with lower wage jobs. We know of course that when you compete with an entity that can print money en masse you are going to lose. As subsistence and more importantly benefits came to these people, the employers offering low wage jobs turned to automation, outsourcing, eventually illegals etc to find sources of workers.

These low wage jobs while not attractive to some people can be stepping stones to other jobs Just as importantly they provide vital self respect that comes with work. Government subsistence brings no such respect. It brings inner shame, societal scorn and other unintended results. Unintended results are one of the main outcomes of government policy. This had long range results in the American family as well, especially in the inner cities. Before these days families held together through tough times. Money was only one of the reasons. When the government became the bread winner, the support of the family unit became less important to the recipients.

Now we turn the page and we are forty years into this period. We have experienced activist groups, welfare rights groups, community organizers which exist for the expressed purpose not only to gain acceptance for people living on welfare and the difference forms of government support but to convince all involved that they deserve even more of the same. It is no longer their lives to turn around, but the government's role to turn it around. We all watched (I hope in horror) at Peggy Joseph who believes Barak Obama is going to make the world perfect so she doesn't need to worry about making her payments anymore.

Here we are at a crossroads. If we continue down this road the whole thing may go up in flames. It is not just that it is taking more and more taxes to pay for all the entitlements and pushes more people from producers to receivers, it is taking a costly toll in human lives. People like Miss Joseph no longer consider their lives their own to fix. How can she become one of the producers when she doesn't consider it her job? How can we watch this happen and not consider it to be cruel? All along the way we could have stopped it and we did not. This is informative because it can still happen but we all must look at the solutions. The politicians can't do it for us. I will write further on this subject in the next installment.