Victims and paying for bad choices
Originally published at www.paganvigil.com/C127135145/E1844815107
Victims and paying for bad choices
How a benevolent and socially progressive government drags people down
When I was channel surfing through the Rita coverage, I came across a very ernest Geraldo Rivera. He was talking about how people just didn't understand that this was the worst disaster that area had ever faced.
Obviously it was the setup for the hoped for aftermath.
Why not blame America for not caring enough?
The politics of victimhood are really climbing my list of things that I can't stand.
All this was brought home to me again when I was reading the San Diego Union-Tribune's article on how the news on Hurricane Katrina had been slanted to show the utter failure of government and civilization.
Except it didn't quite happen that way.
Where are the stories saying "we're sorry, but we exaggerated and what happened in New Orleans wasn't nearly as bad as we said it was?"
No, instead we are supposed to feel sorry and open our pockets deeper.
We're supposed to protect the victim. And if we can't find a victim, one will be assigned to us.
Here is the story I would like to see.
The United States government promised to pay for flood damage. Because of that, the costs of building in a flood plain (or below sea level) were hidden. Suddenly because of government backing, what had been a bad deal became a good deal.
In other words, government was underwriting bad choices.
It wasn't just flood insurance. The Federal government spent decades telling young women that they didn't need husbands and that the government would pay for their children's needs.
But only as long as the women were not married and did not make too much money.
The United States government promised people that they would be taken care of in their retirement.
But they didn't tell them that if they took a quarter of the amount that Social Security removed from their checks and if they invested in nothing more than the top ten stocks of the Dow Jones 40 every year, they could retire twenty-five years after entering the work force with more several times the income they would "earn" with the Social Security Ponzi scheme.
When government interferes with choice and the consequences of those choices, it is changing human behavior for the worse. People don't have to face the results of bad choices until it is too late.
Posted: Mon - October 3, 2005 at 08:02 PM