Winter Warmth, a Right or a Priviledge or a Choice?

I'm about to rant a little bit. I'm sure that my wife won't make it through this post. She hates this stuff. I just want to put this out there and see what people think about it, for the sake of discussion. I'm going to try to do a light-hearted post in the next couple of days.

During medical school we lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a pool and bunny rabbits frolicking in the court-yard (not to mention the family of opossums and bird-eating snakes). It was situated snugly between a vacant Red-Lion with a giant blue light shining on it all night long, a Holiday-Inn convention center, and a trailer park. My wife worked and I went to school. We lived on loans and food-stamps.

We were determined to save as much money as possible. We turned off our lights when we left a room. We set the thermostat to 80 degrees in the summer and saved quite a bit of electricity. A weird quirk in the way our apartment gas bill was set up made us share in the cost of heating with the other five families in the hall. Pretty soon we realized that if we saved 6 dollars worth of gas we paid 1 dollar less. If we used an extra 6 dollars worth of gas we paid an extra dollar. We essentially had no control over the gas bill, all we could control was whether or not we were at a comfortable temperature. Everyone in the hall figured out the same thing and we all paid out the nose.

In Spokane I had more money and a three-bed-room town home. We lived on what I earned and bought our own food. We still tried to save as much money as possible. Our heaters were electric, not gas-powered. In the summer we didn't run our air-conditioning and in the winter we set our thermostat to 55 degrees and put on another layer of clothing. Our electric bill was consistently 150 dollars less than my buddy-at-work's. He thought we were crazy and I thought he was crazy. We both got what we valued. He got thermal energy. I paid down my credit card. That's the beauty of having the freedom to choose. It's the American Dream.

I'm not a proponent of a completely laissez-faire approach to economics. There needs to be oversight and protection from fraud and predatory business practices. I agree that we need a safety net for people who are truly disabled, people who cannot help themselves. Living in a society can afford us the luxury of softening the blows of life for one another. It also makes sense to help people who are legitimately working to become a more productive member of society that will eventually pay back into the system. It makes sense to have public education for children to learn what they need to be successful. It even makes sense to create a public health care system for kids. I know from first-hand experience with food-stamps that there is plenty of help available for people without enough money for food. As much as possible people who can help themselves should be given every opportunity to do so and, ultimately get what they value.

I had a TA that was from the USSR while I was at the U. I talked to him a lot about his life before he came to the US. The quote that sticks out in my mind is, "We all had a lot of money. There was just never anything to buy with it." You basically got the same amount of money and the same house and the same food whether you worked or not so no one worked and everyone got the same thing, nothing. Actually that's not quite true, the elite in the government managed to get a lot of stuff. Everyone else got nothing.

This current economic crisis is the direct result of government pressure on lending institutions to give high-risk loans to low-income people with bad credit because everyone should have the "American Dream" of home-ownership, even though they have made choices that say that they really value other things, things that may lead to short-term happiness but low-income and bad credit.


When I had a lower income and worse credit I didn't get a home-loan because I thought I had some control over my "gas bill". I thought that I could control my own expenses and that if I waited for the right time I would eventually have a home I could afford without the financial burden or commitment. Apparently I was wrong. I live in a country where we all share the cost of every one's home. At some point, I'm going to pay 20,000 dollars in taxes to cover "my share" of this bail-out. Unfortunately, this is not the lesson our country is learning, at least its not the lesson we are hearing in the media and from our politicians. We are moving toward more socialized government and more sharing of costs. If we carry this through to its ultimate conclusion we will all be limited to move at the pace of the slowest among us with no reward for doing more. I'm not saying there is no place for charitable, merciful giving. I believe that is our responsibility to do this. It is also an ennobling, sanctifying activity. However, even that is limited when all of our money is spent for us. If your money is taken from you and given to someone else without your consent it does nothing to make you a better person, it only takes away another freedom to choose.

Well, that was longer than I thought it would be. I didn't develop everything as well as I would have liked and I may have erred on the side of sounding too hard-core. It's basically a first draft. What do you guys think?