Letter from Slim Wolfe
American politics – May 2003 – Colorado Central Magazine
Editors:
Readers will note that Martha Quillen and I have been able to engage in a series of misunderstandings in these pages without getting ballistic or insulting each others ethnic recipes. I’m grateful for the chance to indulge my patriotic duty to get snickety — with another fish to fry this month, namely your habitual letter-writer, Whitefish Dave. Sit on this hard seat, Dave, while we turn the spotlights on.
Claiming himself as a Libertarian Republican, Dave wonders why any liberal would want to pay for his cancer cure. I also pay cash if I have to and mostly try to stay out of the system, but that’s because the odds are stacked in favor of the house and the house seems pretty damned incompetent. Whatever your politics, I’d rather you not be in pain if it can be avoided, firstly out of compassion, secondly because pain makes people get irrational.
It’s notable that Dave doesn’t wonder whether Republicanism hasn’t made health care unaffordable. He’d rather blame the unscrupulous consumer than the unscrupulous manufacturer. Apparently he’d prefer to see our tax dollars spent on overseas trade missions, bailouts, corporate litigations and arbitrations, invasions, and all the other incidental expenses which crop up when a gaggle of corruptible corporations butt heads in the name of free enterprise. I wonder if one big corruptible entity might be cheaper in the long run.
Dave’s stated condemnation of the public sector, seems to be based on peccadilloes done by the private sector, and on one simple word, Aeroflot. Why not say Enron, Quest, Alaska Air, in the same breath, Dave? And I don’t count anyone as an expert on Aeroflot or anything else Russian, unless that person has lived and worked for extended periods in Russia and understands the Russian perspective on history and economics from within as opposed to what you might read and pick up from western media.
If you don’t like state-run monopolies, do you like the Republican alternative, the monopoly-run state? If you should decide to get some medication, are the Republicans helping to keep it affordable by encouraging free competition with the Canadian market? When the last few airlines and publishers have gone under, will you enjoy checking the ads in Freedomflog, the single newspaper, so you can book a flight on Freedomflot? And what about Freedomfluff, the last remaining supplier of groceries, king of the heap after all of the others have faded in your Brave New Republican World Order?
You might not want your tax dollars to pay for bacon, but your tax dollars will probably finance new growth markets for Freedommart in countries where labor organizers are routinely assassinated.
Well, I don’t know the first thing about Whitefish Dave and I’d hate to jump to conclusions. Certainly, I admire a spirit of self-reliance wherever it crops up. But I note that nationalization hasn’t been around long enough for any conclusive assessment, while free- market has been an observable quagmire for millennia, so I wonder how Dave arrives at his conclusions.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove