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Editor's Note: This article does not conform to our usually cultured editorial standards; however, it makes a necessary point in response to repeated and recurring liberal attacks. The reader stands warned of unseemly vulgarity within.
We at Scragged appreciate our readers' comments - yes, even the occasional vulgarity. A recent comment stated that being a Republican is equivalent to saying, "F**k you."
Got problems? Sick? Got no insurance? Hungry? Got no food? Got a baby and no husband? F**k you! You're on your own!
Relatively few people of Republican leanings are able to articulate the issues involved. Their positions may seem to be as callous and as uncaring as "F**k you!" but the story isn't that simple.
Let's start with the extremes. We know of no Republicans who believe that people should be left to starve in the streets. America has a long tradition of private charity such that starvation has been essentially unknown since the founding of the Republic. Very few Americans would say, like Ebenezer Scrooge, that the poor had best get on with dying and decrease the surplus population; America as a whole has never felt that way, nor has any political party.
Republicans don't believe people should starve. The question is what's the best thing to do so that they don't.
Democrats believe that government is the solution of choice to just about any social problem; Republicans believe that people should be encouraged to work out their own solutions to their problems. Republicans tend to believe that government is incapable of solving social problems.
We don't know any Democrats who believe that non-working people should live in McMansions and eat filet mignon at public expense - or, at least, we don't know any who'll admit to it - but as we've noted, our welfare system has resulted in a huge increase in the number of fatherless children on welfare. This increases the agency budget to the joy of the people who work there, but isn't good for society.
The difficulty is achieving the proper balance between individual responsibility and societal responsibility. There are some things which government can do better than private enterprise - the military comes to mind - but very few. The trick is to gain the benefits of government solving problems for which it is suited without having government spending and incompetence destroy the economy.
Private charity is far more effective at ending people's dependence than public charity because the incentives run the right way. If a private drug counseling system guides people to avoid drugs entirely, the charity counts this as a success because success stories help them raise money from donors.
Unfortunately, incentives run backward in government agencies. If a public drug treatment system doesn't cure the person and he or she comes back for more treatment, the agency can ask the legislature for more money because their client list is growing.
Lawmakers are far less interested in making sure that our money is spent effectively than private donors; all they care about is appearing to show that "they care" by funneling large amounts of your money to their supporters.
We see the same perverse incentives in education. A private school depends on parents choosing to send their children there; students' success helps them find new customers to replace the ones who graduate.
Public schools, on the other hand, get to spend more money teaching summer school when they fail to cover the curriculum during the school year. The worse job they do, the more money they make. Similarly, government-run transit systems don't want more riders because they lose money on each passenger; profit-oriented private systems want every passenger they can get.
Consider labor unions. In the early 1900's, management's attitude toward labor was certainly "F**k you." Labor unions were a natural, and arguably necessary, reaction to over-powerful, inhumane employers.
Those days ended with the "Treaty of Detroit" in 1950. All major issues that unions fought for in the early days - worker safety, unemployment compensation, minimum wages, and health care for injuries on the job - are now the law of the land, equally required of companies both unionized and not.
In the years after the 1950 UAW contract, unionized workers increased their incomes considerably and workers in other industries gained pay as well. Unionization of the private sector work force declined from 20% in 1983 to 12% recently, however.
If unionization is such a good deal for workers, why aren't more of them in unions? Because workers have noticed that auto company employment is down 75% from its peak; the Detroit Big 3 may not survive.
Unions originally redressed the power imbalance between workers and management, which certainly needed doing, but over time the unions got too greedy, told management "F**k you," and killed their employers. The Democrats seem to be poised to make it easier for unions to enter more workplaces which, modern unions being the greed-based organizations they are, will raise labor costs and destroy jobs in the end.
The Democratic approach to welfare is to hand out money to any unwed mother and give her more for each child; the Republicans persuaded Mr. Clinton to make it harder to collect welfare so that recipients had to get jobs. Even the Boston Globe recognized that the welfare recipients who got jobs were soon better off than they had been on welfare.
Some Republicans believe that welfare mothers should have to take birth control as a condition of getting the money so that poverty won't multiply as rapidly; our current stimulus bill has language which would eliminate Mr. Clinton's welfare reforms.
Remember the woman the other day who tearfully told Mr. Obama that she needed housing? Wink News had a follow up which began, "Henrietta Hughes says she's not milking the system." The article states that Ms. Hughes had a number of opportunities for housing, but held out for something better.
Why not hold out for what she wants? She can get it, that's why we call such payments "entitlements."
How well-off should recipients of government payments be? Were Republicans heartless for encouraging Mr. Clinton to make it harder to collect welfare?
Democrats patted themselves on the back for "doing something" when they passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, but the scientific study Hotchkiss (2003) says that a smaller percentage of disabled people are employed now than were employed before the act was passed.
Why? Because the law says that employers can be sued unless they make "reasonable accommodations" for disabled employees. Nobody knows what that means, but hordes of under-employed lawyers are eager to help anyone find out.
Businesses see disabled people as lawsuits waiting to happen and don't hire them. Similarly, older workers found it more difficult to be hired once government "protected" them against discrimination due to age.
Democrats may feel good about "protecting" workers, but in the end, nobody benefits except lawyers. Were Republicans heartless for opposing these efforts to protect workers? They've cost a tremendous amount, and didn't help the people they were supposed to help - but they did make politicians feel better.
The elderly or handicapped person not hired by a lawsuit-fearing employer got a government-sponsored "F**k you!" courtesy of the Democrats - only you never hear about those.
The basic issue in health care is extremely simple - if health care is free, how do you keep people from going to the doctor when society can't afford it? Unless there's some mechanism to limit demand, costs become infinite.
Our leaders know this. Hillary's health plan of 16 years ago limited treatment by way of strict treatment rules with the force of law.
If you were too old, for example, the rules said that you wouldn't get enough benefit from certain treatments to justify the cost, so you'd get a government-issued "F**k you!" We're seeing similar rules in the parts of the new stimulus bill which relate to health care.
There's been a big argument in England over whether people will be allowed to spend their own money to pay for expensive drugs which the National Health Service payment guidelines won't give them. Liberal politicians, who know that the system will always decide they should get expensive treatments even if non-politicians are excluded, fear that allowing people to spend their own money on drugs will create a "two tier" system. They conveniently ignore the fact that there already is a two-tier system which benefits themselves.
The March, 2009 Atlantic had an article "My drug problem" which told how the author was cured of breast cancer by $60,000 worth of Herceptin on top of conventional treatment. The article says:
Consider New Zealand. There, a government agency called Pharmac evaluates the efficacy of new drugs, decides which drugs are cost-effective, and negotiates the prices to be paid by the national health-care system. These functions are separate in most countries, but thanks to this integrated approach, Pharmac has indeed tamed the national drug budget. New Zealand spent $303 per capita on drugs in 2006, compared with $843 in the United States. Unfortunately for patients, Pharmac gets those impressive results by saying no to new treatments.
Herceptin was an issue in the recent New Zealand elections - the winning party promised to fund it.
Somebody has to say "no" to medical treatments; patients can't always have what they want. Are Republicans heartless for pointing this out?
Or are Democrats sneaky for not admitting that bureaucrats will have to say "no" and for not pointing out that politicians already enjoy an extremely expensive health care system at our expense? When they talk about "universal" health care, they don't plan to offer anything nice as their medical program.
The basic issues have nothing to do with money itself; they center on consumption. The reason government wants tax money is not because the money benefits them directly, it's because of the things our money can buy.
Welfare recipients don't want money necessarily, they want the things money can buy.
Regardless of government policy, however, nobody can consume anything unless someone else goes to the trouble of making it. If a welfare recipient wants a car or a microwave oven, someone else has to be willing to make the oven or the car and ship it to whoever wants it. People won't do the work of making things unless they're paid.
Increased taxation and increased welfare reduce incentives to work. The higher taxes and welfare benefits go, the fewer people are willing to work and the more people want to go on welfare.
If we end up with too many retirees, welfare recipients, convicts, students, bureaucrats, and other people who consume without producing anything, our society will collapse. Are Republicans stingy for wanting to keep taxes and welfare benefits low enough that people want to work to make the things everybody wants to buy?
We can't have everything we want; there has to be some means of allocating a limited supply of goods to the much larger number of people who want them. Our market-based system uses price to allocate things - if you can't afford something, you're supposed to do without it.
If lots of people want something, the price goes up. More businesses start making it which brings the price back down. If taxes are too high, however, businesses won't bother making things and the price stays high.
Republicans believe that the more goods are produced, the more people can consume. They also believe that you ought to have everything you can afford and that the government should organize itself so that you as much opportunity as possible to earn as much as you can.
The theory is that maximizing opportunity for businesses to profit by selling goods people want to buy leads to maximum economic welfare all 'round. Our tradition of maximizing opportunity has led to the highest living standards in history, but it doesn't offer adequate scope for bureaucrats who delight in writing rules or for politicians who want to spend other people's money.
Democrats believe that government should give you whatever's needed to persuade you to vote for Democrats. They believe it's OK to destroy jobs by taxing away wealth in the name of "fairness" and they believe in spending tax money to help get themselves re-elected or to support political allies.
We already know how that plan works out. Government control of the Soviet economy led to some of the lowest living standards and shortest life-spans of any technological society. The very nations whose national health-care systems American liberals point to as successful examples of how health care ought to be export well-off patients here to get care that they can't get in their own countries.
As John Adams said, "Facts are stubborn things" and it's a fact that government programs seldom deliver the promised benefits, if ever. We've repeatedly asked for an example, any example, of something, anything, that our government actually does competently, anywhere from sea to shining sea.
Excluding the military, we've yet to receive a response. Nobody can think of anything that government does well, yet people seem to want government to do more. Democrats were elected on a promise to have government solve all our problems; Republicans don't think government can solve any problem.
No, being Republican certainly doesn't mean saying "F**k you", though it could be argued that there's a certain element of "You may f**k yourself if you really want to," which is somewhat different.
The trouble is that being Democrat means believing that the government should f**k everybody and make you pay for it.
Which is worse?