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Sunday, May 06, 2012

Can't We All Just Be Julia?

It strikes me that the composite Julia who thrives under President Obama's policies demonstrates exactly what is wrong with Obama' liberal domestic policies.

These policies all rely on a composite person to work. The ideal citizens of President Obama--all of us working together for his policies without partisan bickering--respond to the plan's incentives exactly as the plan's designers anticipate.

Composite people never perpetuate a government program that has no evidence if has lasting benefits because the program is more important for the people who work in them than for the people it was intended to help.

Composite people never have to go to a sub-par school that is disrupted by delinquents who never have to worry about being kicked out and where the teachers are ground into passivity wasting too much of their time trying to cope with delinquents rather than teaching those who want to learn.

Composite people never take on too much debt for a degree with no value in the real world rather than choose a hard science degree or--God forbid--skip college to become a plumber or install and maintain fiber optic lines outside in the cold during a winter that allows web pages to flow to other composite people.

Composite people all face the near-zero chance of having a life-threatening health problem in their early 20s and never have alternatives to an all-powerful state.

Composite people work hard regardless of whether they fight fires or design web pages and it is silly to pay more for hard, dirty, dangerous work than for something they can do from home. Composite people work as hard as their abilities allow and consume only what they need to be sustainable.

Composite people never avoid paying off their debts or saving for the future knowing that by pretending to be helpless the government will eventually forgive the loans or provide the money and make someone else pay for it. After all, after a lifetime of government help up to that point, composite people somehow learned to do the right thing and make those payments and prepare for an uncertain future on their own.

Composite people can't choose to act responsibly and avoid spending cash at after-work drinking bouts where they hook up to have unprotected sex without dirt cheap condoms that could have gone for student loan repayments.

Composite people can't be trusted to stop smoking, drinking, and staying up late without a government-sponsored team to tell them that they are now eating for two.

Composite people can't learn what they need to learn from mere local schools with state and local funding rather than massive federal spending. Well, not since our kids who grew up to put a man on the moon rather than design web pages.

Composite people never run afoul of massive and multiplying federal rules that kill any chance that they might actually make money and become part of the hated 1%.

Composite people never worry about their tax burden and decide running a small business is not worth the headache and risk you might be in criminal violation of some rule you did not know about.

Composite people who do start a business never think that it would be easier to lobby their friends in the government to save their business (or screw their competition) rather than halt their evening trips to the bar for hook ups in order to instead put in extra hours on making their small business turn a profit.

Composite people lose retiree health benefits that would never, ever be lost in the real world even if we have to spend within our means. And composite people never notice that more government intervention in health benefits will mean less federal money for that retiree health benefit as young people who rarely get sick get free contraception.

Composite people can live on Social Security benefits alone and never have to plan ahead for other resources.

Composite people somehow spring into existence to fund that Social Security despite 70 years of composite people who used plentiful government provided contraception to avoid having children.

And of course, composite people know when to get on the ice flow and leave the rest of us alone. Composite people work just like the models say they should. Composite people are predictable. Composite people are happy to follow the slide show of their life that composite bureaurcats design.

If only composite people rather than actual people who respond to incentives no matter how perverse used government-provided services. Then all would be well.

But that's the problem. President Obama had composite people in his autobiography and he really wishes he had composite citizens to rule, too.

I am not a composite citizen. No American is Julia. No American should be.