Picking a Scab
I hate to pick at a wound that has healed, but sometimes I just can’t help myself. I was given some help by this post at Conservative Cowgirls, that tipped me off to this piece by Mark Steyn.
We all remember Graeme Frost, the 12-year old boy who gave a response to the President’s radio address about SCHIP. Young Master Frost wove a sympathetic tale about is family’s tremendous need for health care and the fact that they couldn’t afford it on their own, they needed help…sniff. Except maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe the Frost family could afford it, but simply chose to let the rest of us pick up the tab. Remember all that?
Steyn’s piece is a great reminder about economic responsibility in a free society. Plus, it has one of the better lines I have seen in a while:
[The Frosts] have a 3,000-square-foot home plus a second commercial property with a combined value of over $400,000, and three vehicles – a new Chevy Suburban, a Volvo SUV, and a Ford F-250 pickup.
How they make that arithmetic add up is between them and their accountant. But here’s the point: The Frosts are not emblematic of the health care needs of America so much as they are of the delusion of the broader Western world. They expect to be able to work “part-time” and “intermittently” but own two properties and three premium vehicles and have the state pick up health care costs. Who do you stick with the bill? Four-car owners?
Classic. Steyn goes on:
Much of France already lives that way: A healthy, wealthy, well-educated populace works a mandatory maximum 35-hour week with six weeks of paid vacation and retirement at 55 and with the government funding all the core responsibilities of adult life.
Who pays?
“Who do you stick with the bill? Four-car owners?”
That’s funny. Or maybe not.
I sure thought it was.
It will be the middle class one to two-car owners that will foot the bill, not the four.