Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

I very much need to stop listening to left-wing hate radio. I listen because it is always a good idea to know what your enemy is thinking. (You all remember your Sun Tzu, right? “Know your enemy as you know yourself…”) So, Im listening and the banter is about, naturally, the health care ‘reform’ package that is being worked on. A caller said that people who were worried about the cost needed to stop being selfish and start caring about their fellow man. So, lets examine that thought a minute. The caller isn’t denyong it’s expensive, and he’s not denying it may degrade the quality of health care services in this country. No, he’s saying that the important thing is that we not be selfish.

Personally, I think if you want to be selfish, be selfish. If you want to be caring, be caring. Problem is, this nosebleed on the radio doesn’t just want people to care about their fellow man. He wants to force you to care about your fellow man. Forced charity is, by definition, not charity. Come to think of it, I think its called extortion.

I’m charitable in my own way. I decide when and how I want to be charitable. If I want to be selfish, the only person I have to answer to about it is me…not my peer group, not some invisible man who lives in the sky, not anyone. For someone to demand that I relinquish some of my own resources to help others is pretty close to piracy. You can ask me for a donation, sure..I might even make one. But demanding that I do it ‘or else’ is just a bad idea. These people are pretty easy with spending other peoples money, arent they? If your cause is truly a good one, you won’t need to force people to donate. This is why the Red Cross pulls in millions in donations and NAMBLA has to have bake sales. If there arent enough people willing to gladly support your program then you need to either make your program more attractive to donors or do more with less. You dont call people selfish and then force them to donate at gunpoint.

Conservatives get tagged as heartless rich people with no regard for the plight of the poor. Liberals are labelled as whiny bleeding hearts who ‘feel for the poor’ and believe that by taking from others they can make everyone’s life better. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle. I’m all for making money and keeping as much of it as possible to do whatever you bloody well please with it , but at the same time Im no fan of people living in cardboard boxes. Tax breaks, deductions, and other incentives might be a kinder and gentler way to convince the well-to-do to stop being ’selfish’.

If I had a decent amount of wealth you can bet I’d be converting it into some sort of untraceable and relatively unseizable form. The notion that ‘the rich’ are somehow evil and that the ‘working class’ are slaves to ‘they system’ is getting more and more play these days. We already hear mutterings about making ‘the rich’ (whoever that is) pay ‘their fair share’ and I promise you that youre going to see the definition of ‘rich’ encompass lower and lower incomes and the definition of ‘fair share’ encompass higher and higher takings.

Banks are giving less than 1 or 2 percent on interest these days anyway, so might as well just keep it in nice untraceable cash at home anyway.