BLUF: There are a lot of things that I agree with the Liberals on, but their path to get there seems wrong.

Starting at the top left corner, and working my way clockwise…

Should people working 40 hours a week be living in poverty? The simple answer (and the leftist answer) is no. If you’re working full time, you should be able to afford to live. That seems like a no-brainer, right? The problem is that there are different levels of “working 40 hours a week.” We currently have a huge number of decent paying jobs available in this country, which do offer a “living wage”, but people simply don’t want to do them. At this point and time, the vast majority of jobs out there do pay enough for people to support themselves and their family. Leftists prefer to bring up the “extreme poor” end of the deal (and to be honest, the Right sometimes seems to only see the “extreme wealth” side of things), and ignore the vast majority of people in the middle. I would love to see the country in a position to pay everyone a “living wage”, but the bottom line is, not every job can afford to do that. If you want to earn more money, don’t work at a job that can’t pay you what you need. Of course, the Left wants to point out huge numbers of inner city people who are living in filthy, tiny apartments. Do they exist? Yes, they do. But frankly, a lot of the people who are living that way do have the ability to improve themselves. They simply choose not to.

Should CEOs make exponentially more than their workers? I don’t think that’s something you can regulate, quite frankly. I do like companies such as Costco, who have a system set up to reward employees who stick around, and make it worth their while to stay. But that’s a choice, and it’s not my business to interfere with that choice. The Left choose to see this as a purposeful, wrongful act committed against employees. What they refuse to look at is the investments made by those CEOs in the early days of these large companies. The Left also doesn’t see that there are plenty of grannies and middle aged entrepreneurs who bought stock in some of these companies early on, and yes, they are making money on it. If you take the dividends away from the CEOs, you also defund Grandma. Making one set of rules for one group of people, and another set of rules for another group, is not right. There’s enough Leftist in me that I do wish that more of these mega-CEOs would funnel some of those funds down into their workers. I look at Costco, and I see a company that works hard to empower their employees, which leads to good stuff all around. It does take a chunk out of the CEO’s take-home pay, but his choice has led to a very successful business model and company. But I have no wish to legislate all companies into acting that way.

Wall Street Gangsters. Wow, loaded language. Leaving aside the snark dripping from that one, I think the law should be applied equally to all people. I am disappointed when I see people with access to lots of cash getting away with things. I am even more disappointed when I see innocent people dragged through the courts until they are bankrupt. Whether that’s a firearms manufacturer being sued into non-existence by infringers, or Monsanto suing farmers for stealing their crops just because bees pollinated those farmers’ fields unbeknownst to the farmers, or big city lawyers railroading innocent people into pleading guilty so they don’t bankrupt their families… All these things are wrong.

Ah, school shootings. Knew it would arrive. No child should have to worry… Well, no adult should have to worry about car payments, yet we do. No woman should have to worry about rape, yet we do. See where I’m going with this? This is a sentence with null info. We do fire drills, and have for decades, and children don’t spend their lives in fear of burning to death at school, even though they are MUCH more likely to experience a school fire than a school shooting. School shootings get a LOT of press, because they are rare and because they are newsworthy. Dead kids sell newspapers, after all. The media have sucked the Left into this quagmire of despair, by pumping up all the school shootings. Anything that gets that much airtime is going to cause a ruckus.

Should there be subsidies for companies that are making money? That’s a tough one. I don’t really believe there should be subsidies for anyone. If a bank can’t stay solvent, it should fail. If a school can’t pay its bills, it should close. If a company can’t make ends meet, then they need to come up with a strategy to make it work, or cut costs, or shutter the business.

Politicians shouldn’t tell anyone what to do medically. If we have reason to limit medical services (abortion, tubal ligation, cancer screening, whatever), it should be done via the AMA. Politicians have proven time and again that they really don’t know what they’re talking about a lot of the time. They only know what they’ve read in their briefings, and often, those are horrifically wrong. One need only think of Todd Akin and his commentary on “legitimate rape” to know the truth of this one. (Alter)

Should everyone have access to higher education? Yes. But then again, everyone DOES have access to it. The Left wants higher education (defined, near as I can tell, as white collar university) to be free. Umpteen trillion dollars in debt, this country is, and they want to make this over burdened government pay for kids to go to college, an experiment that never ends well. Anyone in America who really wants to go to school, can. My kids know they’re going to have to work their butts off for scholarships, or do apprenticeship training, or enter the military to enjoy actual “free” education. These methods are available to every single child in America, down to the poorest.

Ah, healthcare. Once again, the Left has mixed up health CARE and health INSURANCE. What they mean when they say these things is not that they want everyone to get care. They mean they want everyone to have insurance, free if at all possible. As with the university comment above, they want the government to pay for this. Now, I will say that there are a few studies that show that communities with high levels of health care are less in debt overall, but they tend to only be looking at upper class white neighborhoods, so the studies are somewhat biased. Again, you can’t have different rules for different people. But communities can, at that small level, make decisions to cover certain health care items for their poorer people. In my neighborhood, every year they have flu clinics. Anyone can come in from the surrounding area, and get jabbed. If you have insurance, they bill for it. If you don’t, they make a note in their books. Most years, I don’t pay for my flu jab, because I make very little money. People in our community have decided that the welfare of everyone is improved when the herd of flu vaccinated people is larger, and therefore the community covers the cost. At the small level, that works just fine. It does NOT work at the country level. All that said, health care is not a luxury. No hospital can turn you away. You CAN get health care, no matter your income level. You just have to pay for it. Oftentimes, if you’re legitimately poor, hospitals will work with you to reduce or remove costs almost entirely. No one’s trying to kill anyone, and doctors don’t get into it for the money.

Are there companies trashing the planet for profit? Probably. I’m guessing that the majority are in China. Here in America, we actually do try to make things better as we go along. Part of the problem that I see with the Left on this point is that they want things “fixed right now,” without looking at the harm that a fix might cause. When we work WITH companies, the world gets better. I apologize for no citation, but I remember one industry in the 80s that fought getting filters put on their smokestacks, only to discover that the filters caught sulfur (I think?) which they could then sell. Shutting down all the companies does nothing but put us even further into debt, which is not going to fix a damn thing.

Lobbyists shouldn’t bribe people. Totally on board with this. I am pretty sure this happens across the board, and not just on the Right or Left.

Equal rights and equal pay. We do have equal rights. Equal pay is a bit harder. I don’t think companies should be able to tell people not to share how much they make, because that’s squashing freedom of speech. On the other hand, that means that people who aren’t making as much may get a rude awakening if they ask why. Companies should be able to look someone in the eye and say, “Karen, you don’t make as much as Betty because Betty does three times the work that you do.” If someone is doing the same work at the same quality, their pay should be the same, though. Here’s where women (rather than the Left) tend to fall down, though. Women as a whole tend to be very reluctant to ask for a raise or demand a higher salary. I’ve talked to many employers over the years, and all have been shocked at how low-ball the salaries are that women ask for. Women need to stand up and ask for more, if they are indeed doing the same as male counterparts. They must equally be ready to walk out the door if they are refused.

No one ought to be homeless. On this one, I find myself wavering. I sit on the fence, but I see hundreds, if not thousands of empty houses slowly decaying. If someone has served our country, they should be helped to find a home. If someone can prove that they actually want to be a home owner, then there should be a way for them to “rent to own” or in some other way work towards owning a home. And loan sharks need to stop giving money to people to buy houses well beyond their means.

So… to summarize the above, the Left wants utopia, and that’s not a bad thing… However, they want to act like utopia is already here, which IS a bad thing, because we are not currently living in a utopia. If the world were perfect, we could indeed make sure everyone had education, a home, health care they could afford, and a living wage. The world is not perfect, though, and there are many people struggling. It’s sort of like women claiming “all men”. It’s not true, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a lot of men, or enough men that I sincerely need to be watchful walking down the road on my own.