Rarely in human history has any one event led to such a confluence of stupid insights, ridiculous analogies, and unsound premises than the Iran War, but of all the idiocy of its critics, the most irritating is the notion that the United States performing its most important role – defending our country – is somehow undermining its alleged obligation to feed and otherwise subsidize the basic needs of all all Americans (and, presumably, the illegal aliens these critics love so much). “You know, all this money we’re spending on bombing the people who want to either convert us to their bizarre, pagan, apocalyptic religion, or murder us, could’ve gone to buying school lunches!” Well, I have a better idea. How about you pay jerks for your own kids’ lunches? And for your own lunches? How about you people support yourselves?
You see what the underlying argument is, and it’s pretty cunning the way they just sort of assume it and expect you to argue on those terms. What they’re saying is that the United States government – that is, we hard-working taxpayers, as opposed to the parasites with their palms up – has an obligation to perform the most basic tasks for every citizen. But we don’t. See, you should buy your own food. And you should buy your own housing. And, more so, you should buy your own healthcare. None of that should come from the government as some sort of right, an invisible universal basic income for the permanently indolent and perpetually aggrieved.
It’s time to get back to first principles, and the very first principle is to take care of yourself and your family. Billionaires didn’t make anybody poor. Being lazy, stupid, and making bad decisions did.
Now, let’s make some qualifications. First, this is a discussion about the role of government. As Christians and Jews, we have certain obligations to the poor that are directed by God, and we should abide by those. Some unfortunates need help, and we should help them in accordance with His Word. But those teachings also make clear that you are expected to care for yourself, barring unusual circumstances. Nor is this a discussion about true safety nets, where somebody ends up with nothing and no place to go for a short time between actual jobs because of some unforeseen misfortune. People in a transitory state of need are not the issue here.
The issue is people whose “need” is a steady state. The issue is drug addicts and lunatics on the streets, as well as the permanent bum class, which expects to be taken care of by other Americans while they sit in their Section 8 apartments, gobbling EBT Doritos and Pepsis, watching their big screens, and chatting to each other on their cell phones. Yes, an astonishing number of people in poverty – poverty in America is paradise in much of the world – aren’t actually poor in any meaningful sense. They are comfortable and well-fed – in fact, if you want to find fat people, you need to go find poor people. We have the chonkiest starving people in the world in America. Being poor correlates with diabetes.
But, of course, you hear the big lie that Americans are starving. No American is starving, except for kids and elderly folks who are specific targets for personalized abuse by caregivers, and occasional maniacs on the street who are so zonked out of it they forget to eat. Those folks should be in a comfortable and compassionate asylum environment, but all those wonderful people who are our supposed moral betters think it’s more important that they waste away on the street because of reasons. One of the reasons, of course, is to confront us with our own badness – when they can point to some derelict sleeping on a stoop, they get to do it from an imaginary high horse. Remember, the Left wants people to be miserable. It gets them power. And that power comes from taking our stuff and giving it to the people they want. But, of course, as we’ve all “leared” lately from the wonderful cultural enrichment provided by Minnesota’s Somali invaders, the good people who never hesitate to tell us how bad we are for not wanting to work for other people’s benefit always take their vig off the top.
America needs to return to a basic premise: You should support yourself and your family. You should feed them. You should shelter them. And you should get them medical care. Now, if you say that to a leftist, they practically plotz. I mean, how can we expect human beings to perform this basic responsibility? Except that you and I have done it our whole lives. Oh, maybe there’s been a moment when we ran out of cash, and things got tight, but things got loose again when we got jobs. I’ve lived on Earth for 61 years. As an adult, I’ve never failed to support myself and mine in terms of food, shelter, healthcare, and everything else. And when I was a kid, my parents somehow miraculously managed to do the same. Yes, I know there are bad people out there. I know some don’t take care of their own, but there’s a remedy for that. We can punish people who don’t obey the rules. The Left is happy to punish us when we don’t obey them. We definitely shouldn’t be rewarding them with free stuff.
It’s not unreasonable to expect people to take care of themselves. After all, we’re citizens, not serfs. We’re not waiting for our feudal lord to deign to provide us with a hogshead of barley to make our gruel. Or are we? Again, that’s what the Democrats want. They want control. They want to do what New York just did: pretend to guarantee everybody’s school lunches because kids are hungry. But that’s not true. The vast majority of people in New York actually work for a living and can afford to buy their kids’ lunches. Democrats want to expand into providing lunches because when you provide something, you control those to whom you provide. It’s not about calories. It’s about power.
Now, when we build bombs, guns, and other cool stuff to destroy our enemies, that is part of the collective responsibility we share as citizens. We all pool our money to buy the things we need to kill our enemies, and that’s good, right, and proper. But providing for basic necessities? That’s not a we problem. That’s a you problem. You need to do for yourself, and you should be ashamed when you don’t. It’s wrong not to support yourself and your people. You should feel bad about it, because it is bad. Even when it is not your fault – and almost everything that happens to you is your own fault, in the final analysis – the fact that you’re in that situation creates an immediate obligation to get the hell out of it. Work harder. Sell some of your stuff. Cancel DoorDash. I don’t care. It’s not my problem, and it’s not mine to solve. It’s your problem, and it’s yours to solve. So, solve it. But the answer isn’t that I should work twice as hard while you sit on your butt. Hard pass.
It’s been a while since we cons have talked like this, but it’s well overdue. If you look at our budget, the military, which is the most important thing the government does, accounts for about 11 percent or 12 percent of our budget. Most of the rest is taking money from one group of people and giving it to another. As we’ve seen, under a utilitarian analysis, it’s bad because there’s always a cut taken at every level by bureaucrats, NGOs, and other parasites who want to live off the hard-working and industrious like us. But under a citizenship analysis, it’s especially awful. It turns us from independent and proud citizens into mere recipients begging, like Oliver Twist, for a little more. No thanks.
Let’s start telling people the hard truth again: It’s your job to feed yourself. It’s your job to shelter yourself. And it’s your job to go out and buy your own medical care. I’ve managed to do it. You guys here at Townhall VIP have managed to do it. And it’s not too much to expect that everybody else does, too. Is it hard? Maybe. Who cares? It’s even harder for me when I’m carrying someone else’s rucksack as well as my own, so don’t try to play that card with me.
Get a job. Don’t be a bum.
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