The month of October was a month of strong emotions – President Bush vetoed the bill to grant children of poverty a health care package. After reading opinion columns from many news sources including The Maroon, I’m surprised that the people of New Orleans still haven’t woken up to see how incompetent the federal government really is. You would think that Hurricane Katrina, Walter Reed Hospital, No Child Left Behind, FEMA and everything else that is run on the federal level, would be enough to conclude that federal programs don’t work. If this particular bill would have passed, I would be damned before I would expose my kids first hand to a hospital like Walter Reed.
Think about what has been more effective for Hurricane Katrina relief. It’s the private organizations, such as Habitat for Humanity, ACORN, Catholic Social Services and other volunteer church groups that have provided the most help. Look what happened to the people of New Orleans who waited for the government to get them out of the city, the people who relied on FEMA aid to help them get on their feet, or the people still waiting for the government to help them get back home. It’s not going to happen. You cannot rely on the government, because it will always let you down. It was the churches that established the hospitals, universities and other great things that make this country excel, not the state. Who knows what would have happened to our levee system if we had hired private contractors who can take responsibility.
After saying that, this business of socializing welfare is another trap that liberal Americans are setting the rest of us up for. Hypothetically, if we were to set up a social program, we will have to create another department in the federal government, which means we would have to hire more bureaucrats and pay them by raising taxes. To ease everybody’s weariness of more taxes, we’ll create a new war called the “War on Health.” This will ease Americans’ minds for the tax hike. Eventually, we’ll blow this huge budget and rely on our friends at the federal government to print more money out of thin air, which causes inflation. Inflation affects all the things that the government has its hand in. When inflation happens, the first people to see that money is the feds, then Wall Street, and only then does it slowly trickle down. The middle and lower classes don’t see any of it.
Meanwhile, education costs go up, prescription drug prices go up, and interest rates go up. The government thankfully has no hand in electronics, therefore cell phones are basically free, iPods are getting cheaper and computers are getting cheaper, all because we didn’t give this aspect of our lives to the federal government. To federalize health care would diminish the talent we have in our medical field. America has the best doctors and cancer centers in the world. Socialize this and good luck taking the federal government to court over medical malpractice.
Do I recognize that a problem exists? Yes. As far as health care goes, we can start by demanding a free market for prescription drugs, and hopefully our healthcare can reshape to a real capitalist institution. Get rid of all these federal departments, and let’s iron these out on the state and local levels. Leave the feds in charge of the Army and get rid of this illegal income tax. I’ll be scared to death if federal organizations like FEMA or the Army Corps of Engineers are the only options I have for my healthcare. It’s easy to have a liberal-minded opinion as a college student at Loyola. You grow up never working a job in your life while your parents pamper and take care of you. When you are a working class citizen and most of the money you earn goes to taxes that support faulty programs, then you will have a better view on how liberalism is the way to destruction.
James Westfall is a jazz studies senior from Houston.
