Well . . . yeah, okay. John Hardly, I used to say a lot of the kind of things you have written above when I was going through my Ayn Rand phase, but I've seen a bit of real life since then. It sounds good in theory, but it fails to pass the test where real people and real situations are concerned. Most poor people are not poor because they are unproductive. And most rich people are not rich because they are productive. Can you give me a rational explanation for why someone like Kenneth Lay got the kind of salary and bonuses he got when he did what he did to so many people? The current business fashion is for CEOs to lay a whole bunches of people off in the name of corporate efficiency, for which they get multi-million dollar bonuses. The people they lay off often wind up living in their cars or under a bridge somewhere. Then, after the wearying effort of laying people off, closing factories, and moving manufacturing facilites overseas to take advantage of cheap labor, the CEO takes his bonus and rests up by hopping the Concord to Europe and sunning himself on the Riviera. Capitalism at its finest!

Sheila, a woman I know, was deserted by her husband and left with two kids. Not trained for anything (married just out of high school), she wound up on welfare. She hated it. Her monthly stipend was barely sufficient to feed her and the kids. She talked to her welfare worker about getting some kind of training so she could become self-sufficient, but they wouldn't approve funds for tuition. So she checked out a business course at a local vocational school that offered a placement service, then tried to accumulate enough money to pay the tuition for the course by doing housework in the neighborhood--dusting, cleaning, making beds, sometimes cooking, scullery work, just about anything to earn a few dollars for tuition. She wasn't trying to keep it a secret from the welfare department. She thought she was doing the right thing and that they would actually approve of her trying to get off welfare and becoming self-sufficient. But no! When they found out she was earning money, they made her account for what she had earned, and then deducted that amount from her next month's welfare check. They locked her into the system! She was trying to be "productive," but they wouldn't let her! This is not an isolated case. It's typical.

There is a station wagon that is often parked across from the local Lutheran church. A woman and a pre-schooler live in the station wagon. She got laid off when the company she worked for moved overseas, couldn't find another job (Seattle's unemployment rate is pretty high right now), and when her unemployment ran out, she had to move out of her apartment because she couldn't afford the rent. She is working. At the local Kentucky Fried Chicken. Minimum wage. Monthly rent on even a studio apartment in the city would take all of her net pay, and no way in hell could she pay first and last month's rent plus a damage deposit. Where is the woman's husband? His National Guard unit was activated and he's in Iraq. Between what he earns while bringing democracy to Iraq and what she earns at Colonel Chicken, she still can't afford an apartment. When Johnny comes marching home, hooroo, he'll find that he and his family are living out of the glove compartment of their ten-year-old Subaru. Nor is this an isolated case. There are hundreds of people like her in this one city alone.

I could fill several pages with the stories of people I know personally who are hard working, productive people--when given the chance. But they find themselves deprived of the ability to be productive through no fault of their own. Whose fault then? The government and the business leaders. But to say "the government and the business leaders" is redundant. They are one and the same. These people I speak of are the serfs in the new feudal system governed by an aristocracy of greed. Welcome to the domestic side of "The New American Century."

A truly civilized nation is best known by how well it takes care of its citizens. All of its citizens, especially those who, through no fault of their own, are unable to take care of themselves. This country does a great job of making things very cushy for those who, by many orders of magnitude, don't need to be taken care of.

John, when I hear people toss off the kind of glib dismissals of real people that you do, it kinda makes my blood boil. Look around you!

Don Firth