There is no free lunch for any of us.

As I said in a previous posting, I think that we humans are a greedy bunch.  Most of us are also, to varying degrees, compassionate beings.  Deep down inside most of us, there is a feeling that we want to help the other fellow if he or she is truly in need.  A century or so ago, this country was a composite of small communities.  We knew most of the people around us pretty well - even in the big city neighborhoods.  We knew the reality of our neighbors' lives.  We knew who was honestly in need and who was a wastrel.  There were no government programs to help the needy, but most communities assisted those that were truly in need and ostracized those that were just plain lazy.  Small rural towns did not have as many bums as now populate our society.  You just couldn't get away with coasting through life as easily as you can now.

The transition from horse to railroads started the process, but Henry pretty much single handedly ruined the system with his newfangled automobile.  Orville and Wilbur helped too.  We became a highly mobile society.  The twentieth century saw the breakdown of the small community that had been one of the pillars of our nation and introduced today's faceless mob where few people really know very much about any of the folks that we work and live with on a daily basis.  If we get into trouble in one place we can move to another and literally reinvent ourselves.  There are a lot of obvious advantages to mobility, but there are some significant disadvantages as well.  One of the more important is that we have lost contact with each other to a greater degree than we know.  Facebook has not yet succeeded in replacing the town busybody and Twitter is not as effective as gossip over the back fence.

In today's America we see people that have a lot, people who have less, and people who have a lot less.  This inequality is a problem and morally we know that we should not ignore it.  More importantly, we can not ignore it or it will destroy our nation.  (Fellow citizens, hear this point - please.)  Those on the political left say that the rich are not contributing their fair share and, on moral grounds, I agree with them.  Those on the right say that there are a lot of freeloaders in the system who are not pulling their fair share of the load.  On very practical grounds, I agree with them as well.  Our system is out of whack and that is obviously not a good thing.  The problem is what do we do about it.  The liberal approach is to blandly demand more from those that have it in order to provide more to those that need it.  The conservative approach is to stamp our foot and demand that the poor become more productive.  Neither approach is working very well.

Newt Gingrich and others have proposed that we stop paying unemployment and replace it with job training.  I like the idea a lot and think that we should expand the principal to every aspect of the imbalance between the haves and the have-nots in our society.  As a corollary, I also favor demanding that everyone (repeat, everyone) in America pay some tax.  The basic principal would state that there is no free lunch and no government dole for doing nothing.  When that principal is applied that way (and only then), I favor demanding that the super rich pay more in taxes to help support these programs.  The conservative pundits that point out that it is wrong to demand a disproportionate amount from someone who has worked hard for their money have a point, but so do the liberals when they ask how much wealth is enough wealth.  How does one spend a billion dollars in just one lifetime?

Here is the bumper sticker:  Get rid of the free lunch, spread the tax burden out to all of us, reduce government spending significantly, and raise taxes on the folks that can obviously spare the change.  Then get off the dime and get very serious about creating jobs for all of us.