Put Me In Charge

On Thursday, November 18, 2010, the Waco Tribune published a letter to the editor by a man from Gatesville, Texas, named Alfred W. Evans. The Record Number is 11182010-wac-letters. Somehow, somebody attached the title "Written by a 21 year old female," and concerned people started circulating it all over on the Internet with that subject. I received it from two of them. Here is the text of the article:

LETTERS: Fixing Social Security; Put me in charge of welfare, Medicare and housing grants

Waco Tribune-Herald (TX) - Thursday, November 18, 2010 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 and document all tattoos and piercings. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke or get tats and piercings, 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.

Let's face it: poor people are just as human as rich people are, with the same basic needs and goals. The difference is that poor people don't seem to be able to fulfill and achieve them, respectively. During the three generations of my working lifetime, giving them "welfare" on the pretext of "helping" them hasn't done it. Do we really believe that trying to force them to do it is going to work? I maintain that poor people in this Country will never achieve their God- given destiny as long as the rich enslave them by denying them the one thing that all human beings need to excel, which is incentive. The "War on Poverty" has been taking away the incentive for poor people to lift themselves out of poverty by paying them to be poor for over half a century. For sixteen percent of our population, being poor is their most lucrative occupation!

I believe absolutely in the Biblical injunction to give poor people what they need, not just pay them what we think they're worth and hope for the best! In this country, they already have opportunity! What they need is incentive to take advantage of it. Put me in charge, and this is what I'll do, and if I sound angry, it's because I am angry about the way the rich in this country have sold the poor back into slavery to "keep them in their place" on the pretext to "helping" them to live irresponsibly!

Put me in charge of food stamps. I'd get rid of Lone Star cards, One Star cards, Cash for Kids cards, and every other kind of card that people don't buy with their own money. I don't give a damn if you eat Ding Dongs or Ho Ho's or 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and powdered milk. It's your stomach; you decide what to put in it. Feeding you is not a government function! That's the American way! Whatever you want to buy is OK with me; that's what freedom is all about! If somebody gives you a good deal on steak and frozen pizza, buy them. I don't care. Just don't expect me to pay for it - at all!

And don't expect me to pay for you to be unhealthy, either. I will sponsor laws that make you pay extra for every single added public expense because you are too large, from extra health insurance premiums to charging by weight for airline tickets. Because obesity is a social problem, I will purposely do everything I can to discourage you from consuming more than your share. I'll even allow skinnier doors in places where they just don't want to associate with people who abuse themselves. If you have a glandular condition, deal with it or get it fixed. Don't try to make it amyone else's problem, because it's not.

If your kid comes to our public school malnourished, I'll use the money I'm going to save not buying your food to check up and make sure you're giving him the right amount of his. If not, both parents go to jail for child abuse and the kid gets adopted by somebody who wants to take care of him - and I'll put the prisoners to work doing something useful, to make the whole thing self-supporting! I guarantee you'll slim down and learn to take responsibility for your own actions in my jail!

Put me in charge of Medicaid. Taking care of you is not a government function! I'll pay the hospitals to take care of indigent children, period! If your women can't keep their legs together, let them buy the Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations instead of fancy fingernails, tattoos and fake hair. One thing I absolutely won't do is spend money to test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine, and document all tattoos and piercings, because I just don't give a damn. You will be free to use all the drugs, alcohol and nicotine you want! Get tattoos and piercings to your heart's content. If you OD, it's OK by me; it's your choice and unmarked graves are cheap. If you ruin your health, go someplace and die, because I won't be paying for it! Power to the People!

It is your God-given right to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke, or get tats and piercings. I'll even help you with the drugs; I'll make 'em all legal! If you're going to buy them anyway, why shouldn't it be from an American pharmaceutical company that can guarantee quality and purity, just like alcohol, tobacco and tats? But you take the consequences! If you present yourself in public as a weirdo or freak or a junkie or a chronic drunk, I won't hire you or do business with you or trust you or loan you money, and I probably won't sell you a home in my neighborhood, either. And if that makes you tired of living, that's just too bad. It's your choice, not mine.

If your kid comes to my hospital sick or wounded or abused, I'll use the money I'm going to save not paying for your medical bills to check up and find out why you're not treating him right. If you aren't, both parents go to jail for child abuse and he gets adopted by somebody who will take care of him and his biological parents pay for it, and I am as serious as a sucking chest wound about that! You may think I can't find you, dad, but your DNA is on file in every cell of your kid and almost certainly eventually in the criminal database, too! We can wait for it to show up! It probably won't be that long!

Put me in charge of government housing. I'll sell it all to the highest bidder until it's all sold and then quit. Live anywhere you want, as long as you can pay for it yourself. If you want to live in a military barracks, join the military. If you want to live in property in a clean and good state of repair, keep it that way. If not, I don't care! I will not spend my neighbors' hard-earned tax money to inspect or inventory your home, because it's your home, not ours, and we have absolutely no right to come in unless you invite us. I don't care where you live or what you put in your home as long as you stay where you belong! Show up where I live, and I'll have you arrested for vagrancy! If all you can afford for a home is a refrigerator crate, get one and live there. I did!

Put me in charge of unemployment compensation. I will use the money to provide a government service that matches up employers to employees willing to work who can do the job, and collect fees for the service that pays the taxpayers back. I will absolutely not create a huge bureaucracy of minimally educated, functionally illiterate, otherwise unemployable, sociopathic, fat, rude, unwashed representatives of historically disadvantaged racial minorities to verify your "check stub from a job" each week, because I don't care whether you work or not!

I will definitely not "offer" you a "government" job, either. If you want a "government" job, pass the civil service exam or join the military! I'm not going to "give" you or "find" you a damned thing! If you want to clean the roadways of trash, paint and repair public buildings or some other thing that you think needs doing, get yourself a contractor's license, show up at your local public works administration, and submit a bid. That's the American way. Alternately, you can commit a crime and I'll put you to work doing that for nothing. You'll slim down, build up your muscles, get lots of fresh air, and learn valuable lessons about the consequences of being an outlaw.

By the way, your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your $1000 stereo and speakers are no concern of mine. But if you blast your stereo too loud, we're going to arrest you, impound your flashy car that's making all the noise, and sell it if you can't pay the fine, and put that money back into the public treasury to pay the police to do that.

Put me in charge and I'll repeal all the "minimum wage" laws there are that keep an employer from paying some deadbeat the little that his sorry ass is worth and make him pay for not working. I can buy all the work I want from my power company for $8.00 per thousand man hours, and that's flat out work, not shuffling around complaining about how you're being disrespected. If you want more than 6.4 cents per day, be worth that!

Before you write that I've violated someone's rights, realize that I already did all I plan to do for his rights in the rice paddies of Korea and the jungles of Vietnam, not to mention the campus of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. As far as I'm concerned, you have the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. If you pursue happiness by shooting up, fornicating and dropping out of school to have a baby, be my guest! The whole thing is voluntary. If you want our tax money, do something to earn it, because we're not going to give you any if I'm in charge!

Before you say that this would be "demeaning" and ruin somebody's "self-esteem," consider that I don't care! If you think that taking someone else's money for doing absolutely nothing is or isn't demeaning and lowered self-esteem, it makes no difference to me because I'm not going to be involved one way or the other.

Put me in charge because I understand the welfare mentality; I don't work, either. The reason I don't work is because I don't have to! I spent 22 years learning to do something useful and then I got paid so much doing it that I paid for the 22 years, and then some. I guarantee that if I were starving or didn't have enough money to take care of my kids, I'd be out there hustling for a good enough job even if I have to take yours! I've been there and done that already, and, trust me, homelessness and starvation combined are great incentives! Now I've got mine; let others get theirs. It is morally wrong, unproductive, unpatriotic and sinful to take money from productive citizens to enslave other people so that they cannot get theirs, and if I'm in charge, I'm not going to do that.

If we are expected to pay for other people's mistakes, somebody's expectations need drastic changing! Why should we attempt to make them learn from their bad choices? Let them learn their own selves, like we did! I agree that the current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices, but rewarding them less for continuing to make bad choices isn't the answer. Put me in charge and I won't reward them for making bad choices at all! I'll make it worth their while to act like human beings instead of mindless, rutting animals!

It costs money to keep track of who is on government subsistence to keep them from voting. There's another savings I'll make if you put me in charge. People dead from drug overdose or malnutrition or not being able to afford medicine automatically don't vote! Think of it as evolution in action!

I will do everything I possibly can to make the cost of food, health care, education and housing fair to the buyers and the sellers. I will provide incentives for you to study in school or learn a trade or better yourself in any number of ways so you can get a maximum wage job instead of being content and barely making ends meet with a minimum wage. Minimum wage is for high school kids and retired people with nothing better to do, not heads of families. Being human should be a reason for excellence, not an excuse for failure! Everybody's life should matter; it is the responsibility of each person to make it so, not just scream about it while they're rioting!

I am second to absolutely none in my belief that we all, each and every one of us, have a sacred obligation to: feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, cure the sick, comfort the imprisoned and bury the dead. I'm also in favor of instructing the ignorant, counseling the doubtful, admonishing malefactors, patiently enduring wrongs, forgiving offenses, comforting the afflicted, and praying for others, but those aren't government functions. Those are functions of the church, synagogue, mosque, temple, lodge, club, fraternity, sorority or whatever, but definitely not the government.

If you want to quote the Bible, look at 2 Thessalonians 3:10, and maybe Exodus 20:15 and Leviticus 19:11. Stealing is stealing, whether the government does it or somebody else. The government's role is to make it possible for every citizen, rich or poor, to learn how to fish, and to keep the fishing hole accessible. If you want to give a man a fish to feed him for a day, it's fine with me. If you want to feed him for a lifetime by teaching him how to fish, that's OK with me, too. I'll even allow you to guarantee him an endless supply of your fish if that pleases you.

But if you put me in charge, when he eats all your fish, you both starve, and he blames you, it'll be your problem, not mine, and not that of my fellow taxpayers, either, because we just won't be involved.

Sign me, John Lindorfer