I just read an article that says by being residents of a small French town Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are eligible for $2,600 in monthly child benefits. That is comprised of a nanny payment of $975 and an orphan allowance for each of their adopted children of $509 each.
Is that the vision liberals want for America, government payments for nannies?
What makes people think that the best way to run a country is to have high taxes and then have the government allocate those taxes (after all the expenses of running the bureaucracy) among the population according to some perceived standard of fairness?
Barack Obama is proof that just about anyone can get ahead in America if he or she takes advantage of each opportunity and works hard to boot. Has that concept suddenly become out of favor?
My father was a used care salesman, my parents and my sisters and I lived in a one bedroom apartment (my parents converted the dinning area into their bedroom) and we neither looked for nor received government aid. My parents were finally able to buy a home when my father was 60 and then only because my sister and her family shared a single family home. No government programs were involved, no rebates, no tax breaks, no subsides. My father worked on commission so if he didn’t sell a car he made no money, except for what was called a “draw, in effect an advance on future sales, but while we never took any big vacations, we never went hungry either.
When I graduated high school (one that was 50% minority for the record), I went to work for a big company as a mail boy, the lowest paid job out of 15,000. Today 47 years later I am still there and let’s just say that after nine years of evening college, two years in the Army and working 60 plus hours a week I am no longer the lowest paid person (but interestingly, there is one person who worked with me in the mail room who is still in the mail room and 73 years old).
So, would a liberal point of view say that I should pay higher taxes so that my colleague can receive a larger social security benefit?
If I sound cold or even arrogant, that is not my intent.
My fundamental question is where does personal responsibility end and society’s responsibility begin?
What exactly does an individual have a right to from society or more specifically from society’s government?
While I am smart enough to know that there are people who for one reason or the other are not capable of helping themselves or simply have suffered from bad luck, but they are the minority. The vast majority of people have what they have, are what they are because they have made choices in their lives. When years later it turns out those choices were not the best, is it society’s responsibility to change things?
