The poor you will always have with you" — Jesus H. Christ, first century.


Then came the twentieth century, and the conflation of God and government: from that point on, those responsibilities were shunted off to the government, accompanied by the feeble explanation that only government is big enough to do what needs to be done. And if what needed to be done was the expenditure of trillions of dollars to no discernible avail, then yes, only government was big enough to do that:



Nota bene: Worlds are not "changed" by mass human action. We can screw around with the infrastructure a bit, and maybe rearrange the deck chairs now and again, but the central component of the world is the human heart, multiplied several billion-fold, and hearts are changed the same way they always have been: one at a time.

Part of Changing The World is mocking the efforts of those who are actually doing good while failing to follow the script. There's a medical facility on the north side of town that works on a cash-only basis, at prices far below the going rates as proclaimed by the medical establishment — which means "as proclaimed by the government," since how much the Welfare State will pay becomes the de facto price. This facility, you may be certain, draws detractors:

Yesterday, we operated on a patient from Idaho. He had no insurance. He was quoted $11,000 for his surgery. We did the whole thing for $3740, the price advertised on our website — everything included. I did his anesthetic and it occurred to me during the case that when I interviewed him there was one question he didn't ask me. That's right. He didn't once ask about how our model worked for the indigent, those who couldn't come up with the fee listed on our website. For his family, in his own personal world, he was saved a little over $6000, if you include travel and lodging costs. That's all he cared about.

I have never been asked "how does your model take care of the indigent," by one single patient whom we spared bankruptcy with our fees. Not once. That our fees are charitable when compared to those at the big hospitals seems to escape the attention of the detractors, those who can't stand the idea that cheaper and better are possible without government involvement.

Now if your immediate thought is "How does he have $3740 to begin with? There are no jobs," then Larry Correia has a message for you:



Been there, done something not quite like that:


None of these were particularly exciting, except perhaps at the exact moment when the Irresistible Force meets the (we hoped) Immovable Cable Box — and that got old pretty quickly. Still, it was a job, and for a brief period it came close to paying the bills. Someone who wants to Change The World would have turned up her nose at such a thing because it was so, you know, totally mindless and not at all contributing to her brave new world where there are no poor people, except maybe for the guys who work for the lawn service, and at least they're making something beautiful, you know?

Confronted with unindividuals like this, I call out: "Jesus H. Christ!" The stupid, like the poor, we will always have with us. And a War On Stupidity would cost every gram of wealth on the planet, and the next two besides.

The Vent

  24 March 2013

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