October 1, 2014

My neighbor and friend is a socialist, originally from Sweden. Both he and his wife are schoolteachers!

He abhors big companies and capitalism at its roots. He believes government here, as in Sweden, should manage all aspects of our lives. He favors income equality and higher taxes on successful companies and individuals. (Notwithstanding, he owns two homes, three cars and travels four times per year between California and Stockholm to visit grandkids.) His view is utopian: an educated, healthy, safe, happy and fecund populace with enough free cash to enjoy one month of vacation for every month spent working. It that were reality, I wouldn’t mind paying more in taxes. Sadly in America ,bigger, more involved government has proven ineffective at best and corrupt at worst. We simply elect carpetbaggers who hire in their own image. It is not their money they ‘re continuing to waste, so why work hard and worry?

Examples are plentiful. Just think back five years: a financial collapse due to Treasury and SEC inept management, IRS loses thousands of e-mails and lies about it, National Security Agency allows one man to steal thousands of classified documents, the incompetent Veterans Administration is charged with killing dozens of veterans due to bureaucratic inaction, implementing Affordable Health Care was mangled beyond repair but proved a windfall for insurance companies, the Air Traffic Control System is vulnerable on all levels as validated by Chicago’s O’Hare shutdown this week and now we learn the Secret Service was asleep on the job of protecting the president. Don’t even get me started on the blunders of Homeland Security.

All this from a country the rest of the world once looked up to.

What happened? Ask ten people and you’ll get ten answers. Mine is simple – group responsibility has displaced individual responsibility. No one in government feels responsible – including the president.

Sorry Hillary, but you are wrong. It doesn’t take a village to raise a child. It takes an involved parent who instills a psychic value system of hard work into their children. Many working parents now appear to have abdicated that responsibility to nannies, soccer coaches, teachers and mood altering drugs.

My first job, at age 13, was working part time in a small grocery store where I was tasked with: 1) cleaning the butcher block with a steel bladed scraper and, 2) sweeping the floor at the end of the day. We had the cleanest butcher block and floor of any store in the state. I took great pride in my work and vowed to do my best. Eventually I was rewarded with promotion to retail clerk responsible for closing the store each day and taking receipts to the bank. Motivation for increased responsibility, first experienced in that little store,  has served me well for a lifetime of exciting challenges and successful careers. Yes -career(s) plural.  I’m now on my third -writing.

Next time we consider candidates for public office, perhaps we should investigate their early job history and look for ‘meniality’. If that doesn’t work, let’s simply do a reverse merger into Sweden.

You are welcome