Sense: A fictional short-short story

The Bay Area Ascetic

Better to Give? A short-short story

I'm Nearly Overwhelmed

On a Walk With My Great Grandson: an episode in a 3-part series

"I'm Disillusioned" A Q&A

Bay Area Hypocrites

A Libertarian-Leaning Person Shares His Doubts

I was walking my dog, Einstein, and passed a few houses that had Meg Whitman for Governor signs on their lawns. All were very fancy houses. In itself, that means nothing but it triggered these thoughts:

A core libertarian principle is that more good accrues from leaving money in rich and upper-middle-income people's pockets than the government heavily taxing them and redistributing the money to the working class and poor with massive "social programs" as well as cash "benefits." The libertarian thinking is that the rich are more capable of creating new businesses that will, in turn, create products and services that will improve all our lives as well as create jobs.

This may seem obvious but I wondered, "What percentage of those rich people's money really went to such activities and how much went to building and decorating lavish homes, buying fancy cars, clothes, and vacations, paying for elite college educations at colleges their kids mightn't have gotten into if they weren't "legacies," and least useful of all, how much do those fat cats leave to their children, which increases the chances of their being made lazy from all that wealth being handed to them--the rich person's version of the welfare mentality?

I then turned to the reality that ever more millions of Americans simply do not have the wherewithal to survive in our ever more demanding world economy. Without the government redistributing wealth from the rich and upper-middle-class to the lower middle-class, working class and poor, we'll see ever more misery, homelessness, and crime. And then there's the intrinsic injustice of anyone going without health care, shelter, and food in a country in which millions of Americans do live the aforementioned minimansion lifestyle.

So while I am most aware that government wastes an inconceivably large percentage of our tax dollars in their usually Rube-Goldberg-like, labyrinthine, incompetently administered schemes for redistributing our wealth, not to mention "regulate" the unpoliceable, and fight wars we likely shouldn't fight, my little doggie walk took a bit of the ardor from my libertarian zeal.