04-09-2018, 05:32 AM
(04-08-2018, 11:58 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Your inheritance (parents money) was gobbled up by healthcare (nursing home) costs associated with your parents care. Are you basing economic views of America on your own view of the economy and the financial position that you are in now?
NO. I do so to make clear that doing the right thing may itself be self-destructive or lead to a miserable life. I also illustrate the hazard of an economy that has decided that the gain of certain groups that get an entitlement to charge whatever the traffic will bear will lead to the impoverishment of many others. Such may especially hurt people who follow the rules out of a low threshold of feelings of guilt.
I could put up with authoritarian demands by aging, and increasingly demanding, parents with the satisfaction that when it was all over there would be enough to allow me to have some cushion for starting over at a low level. That cushion is gone. I have been at a position in which I thought that, stuck in a community that allows few ways of life in which happiness is possible, in which I have a mental condition that hurts me alone, in which opportunities are few and awful, and in which elderhood in poverty is pure pain, I had nothing for which to live. I was a candidate for suicide.
What I lost was my life savings because I had to give up paid work to keep my parents going. If I had been a slimy person I would have abandoned my parents and gotten some predatory, if licit and lucrative, way of life. The community in which I exist is the sort of place that people with ambition leave unless they want to stick with a family business (that national chains out-compete) or stay on the family farm (family farming is shrinking in numbers as farms get consolidated). Michigan has undergone a second Depression as the auto industry that created a strong economy has shrunk in relative terms in America and has also left Michigan to a large extent. Michigan has undergone a perverse sort of economic change in which agriculture has by default become more important; it can generate revenue, but it is not a good provider for laborers.
I had hoped to move on to some place that offers more and demands less. I may be stuck. I no longer consider my life precious but instead simply difficult and unrewarding.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.