I get these emotional appeal type e-mail forwards every day. I usually delete them without reading them (just so all you forwarders know, and besides; I get the same information, if it’s even real, days to weeks, to sometimes years, before you apparently did). This one caught me eye as something that needs to be addressed though;
“PUT ME IN CHARGE . . .
Put me in charge of food stamps. I’d get rid of Lone Star cards; no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho’s, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.
Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I’d do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, or smoke, then get a job.
Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks? You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your home” will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place.
In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a “government” job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the “common good..”
Before you write that I’ve violated someone’s rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules. Before you say that this would be “demeaning” and ruin their “self esteem,” consider that it wasn’t that long ago that taking someone else’s money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem.
If we are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.
AND While you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes, that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov’t welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.”
Followed of course with the obligatory;
“Now, if you have the guts – PASS IT ON…”
Oy. I guess we’re supposed to respond with a hearty; “YEAH! You Tell ’em!” and then go back to our search for other emotional stimulants, such that by the end of each day we’ll need to get drunk or bury our faces in the television to calm down.
Uh, no. I responded to the forwarder thusly;
“This is all assuming that the government is rightly and should forever be in charge of “charity” by way of coercive redistribution, which of course is the problem from the start. It shouldn’t.
‘Put me in charge’ she says….
No, Young Grasshopper; PUT THE CONSTITUTION BACK IN CHARGE. PUT THE FOUNDING PRINCIPLES BACK IN CHARGE and then we won’t have those in government usurping the very concept of charity and turning it into something horrible.”
Oh, and just as a side note; If you can’t vote as long as you’re on government subsistence? Heh! No problem; we’ll just make sure everyone is forced onto government subsistence. The Progressives are working on that right now anyway, and so long as you’re dependent on them, vote or not, you’ll have to do what they tell you.
This is the difference between Democrats and Republicans on one side, and libertarians/objectivists and Christians on the other. The former see the problem as an issue of WHO is in charge, while the latter see the issue as being whether or not the guiding principles are in charge. Whoever wrote the forwarded e-mail is every bit as clueless as any card-carrying, ideological Marxist, and most likely is a die hard Republican; take all of the leftist assumptions, make them your own, and wish you were in charge of administering them so you really SHOW THEM, BY GOSH AND BY GOLLY, GEE WHIZ!!!. I’d tell such people to go to hell, but they’re almost certainly already there, so even if they were genuinely inclined to take my advice it would make zero difference.
I’ve tried to say this in several different ways already, but we’ll give it another try;
That which irritates you owns you. It has converted you over to its purpose. This e-mail forward is a PERFECT example of that, and think how many cultures have been trading one tyrant for another, for another, for yet another… Get it?
I’ve seen something like this before and have even written my own “king for a day” version.
A friend of mine quietly mentioned something much the same as you. He mentioned that the “deal” for no taxes on religion was that they did the charity work.
The reason the people who put the government in charge of charity hate that idea is because the churches impose conditions and rules about who receives their charity and who will continue to get it.
Eliminating such conditions seems to part and parcel of the people who came up with welfare.
“…the “deal” for no taxes on religion was that they did the charity work.”
Ah, and look at the brilliance of that little ruse. It has the major religious institutions accepting the premise that government is in charge, that with or without the approved religions (!) government is the Great Redistributor of wealth. It says to the religious institutions, “We in government are ultimately responsible for ‘charity’ but since you’re doing some of it FOR US we’ll cut you a piece of our pie. It turned religious charities (and only the officially recognized ones mind you) into government satellite institutions. That was just a first step.
Remember that Obama, soon after taking office, was floating the idea of eliminating the tax exemption for charitable donations. THEY know where they’re taking us even if we’re too distracted and irritated to notice.
Love it … I’m reblogging it.
The problem with the Rs and Ds and other flavors of statists is, as you allude, that they don’t object to the (oppressive, enslaving) machinery of them state, but only who’s controlling all of the knobs and levers. They all assert that if we just let THEM be the ones to operate the knobs and levers, all will be well. They fail to understand that the mere EXISTENCE of all of that machinery is the problem, not just who’s operating it.
Since such change has to be incremental….lets use the above letter as a starting point…and reduce from there.
One has to educate the populace and making them work for assistance will definitely be an education.
Great post.
And as regulation is accumulative and accretive, and never seems to go away, no matter who is elected, regulation becomes like a shirt of mail, each individual ring requiring a tremendous campaign to eliminate it, and each individual ring almost pointless in its elimination, yet you can’t swim in a mail shirt, and eventually the weight will suffocate its wearer.
What Lyle said about the co-opting of the religious organizations, that’s the second insidious effect of income tax (the first being the hindering of wealth accumulation by poorer folk due to the annual haircut. The third is the idea that your confidential information is to be given in great detail to minions of the state who will, of course, keep it secret.).
“…each individual ring requiring a tremendous campaign to eliminate it, and each individual ring almost pointless in its elimination…”
There’s a bigger picture, the end-run. Whole categories of laws and whole “departments” will have to be eliminated in single, broad strokes. There’s nothing to prevent it but our own cowardice and lack of vision (well that, and the Republican Party which currently stands in our way).
But politics is secondary (or quaternary). That’s a most important point and one that most people will either never see or avoid it of they do see. It works something like this;
As goes the individual, so goes the family
As goes the family, so goes the community
As goes the community, so goes the state
As goes the state, so goes the country
As goes the country, so goes the world.
That puts YOU at the tip of the pyramid. It’s a pretty heavy responsibility, isn’t it? Who’s up to it?