Please allow me to paraphrase a famous quotation: “If you are young and you don’t believe in Big Government, you have no heart. If you are old and you don’t believe in Small Government, you have no brain.” Most savvy investors go through this conversion at some point in their early-adult lives. I imagine that most conversions occur slowly after much time for deliberation and life experience, but that’s not how it was for me. I can remember the exact moment when my conversion occurred.
I grew up in New York, where the current governor recently said that citizens who do not support abortion and gun control have “no place” in his state. It’s a state whose leaders attempt to control everything, from the amount of salt on the table at your favorite restaurant to the size of the cup from which you drink your soda. None of my teachers ever used the word “Keynesian”—they probably had never heard of it!—but that’s how they thought and that’s what they taught. It’s no wonder that I grew up believing in Big Government ideals since I was incessantly spoon fed this tripe in my formative years.
Yes, I admit it: I used to believe that the government should collect more tax money to fund the “war on poverty.” I used to believe that “evil corporations” needed more government oversight to thwart them from screwing over the public. I even believed our leaders should adopt new laws to combat global warming. I never questioned my sixth-grade public school teacher when he predicted we’d be living in subterranean cities by the time I turned 40 due to an expanding ozone hole and runaway global warming rendering the surface of the Earth uninhabitable.
I know, I know… ridiculous, isn’t it? I probably would have believed him if he claimed he owned a unicorn and that a pot of gold lay at the end of every rainbow! Well, age 40 is several years in the rear-view mirror for me and I’m living in a subdivision, not an abandoned gold mine. (As an aside, does anyone even talk about the ozone hole anymore? Just curious.)
Luckily, I had good parents who, despite the oppressive regulations from the overlords in Albany, were able to eke out a reasonable living running a small private business. My parents taught me to work hard and try to better myself. I got my first taste of the real world when I got a minimum-wage job at the local McDonald’s.
Imagine my surprise when I received my first paycheck! I knew how many hours I worked. I knew how much I was supposed to be paid per hour. So why was my paycheck so much lower than it should have been? Despite feeling somewhat irate over Uncle Sam pilfering a third of my pay, I still subscribed to Big Government theory because I felt confident that my tax money was being put to good use for worthy causes.
I learned quickly that I didn’t want to work at McDonald’s for the rest of my life, so I attended college and then medical school. College, of course, was also a sheltered land of unicorns and rainbows, where professors universally proclaimed that every government program was an unbridled success because everything worked exactly as the government promised it would. But they couldn’t shield me from reality forever. During my third year of medical school, they finally burst open the ivy-tower doors and thrust me onto the wards of the hospital to deal with real patients and real problems.
My fellow medical students and I were in the first week of our psychiatry rotation, and the attending physicians were already growing tired of us shadowing their every move. So they dumped us on their underlings, forcing us sit in on “group,” the slang patients used to describe group counseling sessions. Group sessions were run by counselors and were exactly like the stereotypical Hollywood versions we’ve all seen and laughed at: “Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves, tell everyone why we’re here, and what we hope to accomplish in today’s session. Maybe later, if there’s time, we’ll break into smaller groups and do a little role playing!”
I was paying $20,000 a year in tuition for this?
The med students hated group. Each session was a total waste of time, despite the attending physician’s insistence that they were good “learning opportunities.” I hated them too, but it was during one of these “groups” when my conversion occurred.
I don’t remember his name. Let’s call him Hank. Hank was a young, 20-something, able-bodied man who was admitted to the hospital for alcohol abuse. Hank drank a lot of alcohol and would do stupid things while drinking. Things like beating up his girlfriends, picking fights with bar patrons and police officers, petty theft. He was there not because he wanted to give up his drinking and turn his life around, but because a judge told him if he didn’t check himself into the nearest detox center, he would go to jail. Hank had destroyed a fair amount of gray matter from years of beer and hard liquor, but he had enough sense to fake sincerity to the judge and accepted treatment at our facility.
When it was Hank’s turn to tell why he was here and what he hoped to accomplish with today’s session, he spun a sad tale of woe. The whole world was against him. He just couldn’t catch a break. He drank alcohol to escape from his emotional pain. And then, he uttered the words that finally opened my eyes to reality: “The gub’mint only gives me $900 a month and that don’t do me nuthin’!”
Boom! The real world just jumped out from behind Hank, lunged across that room, and bitch-slapped me on the cheek. There I was, a wide-eyed medical student just embarking on life’s great adventure… I was going to save the world! Unicorns and rainbows for everyone! In the blink of an eye, my conversion was complete. I walked into that room as Paul Krugman and walked out of it as Ludwig von Mises.
I couldn’t believe Hank’s audacity. I was a starving student, burying myself in student debt so I could become a productive member of society. What I could have accomplished with a $900 handout each month! And this guy had the nerve to not only accept it, but then to complain that it was not enough?
Please don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to make light of drug or alcohol addiction, and my heart goes out to those who have problems and truly want to get better. But I contend that Hank’s main problem was not his alcohol addiction. Hank’s main problem was Hank himself. His attitude. His philosophy on life.
Hank relied on the gub’mint for everything. He had no desire to better himself or to care for his own needs. He had the gub’mint for that. It clothed him. It fed him. It paid his rent. It enabled his drinking. The gub’mint couldn’t help Hank fight alcohol addiction. Only one person could help Hank: Hank himself. And until Hank realized that simple truth, he was doomed to continue his slow spiral downward.
I don’t think Hank realized the profundity of the words he spoke, which sounded to me like “The government took $900 from people who earned it and gave it to me, and it did me no good whatsoever!” If that doesn’t sum up the problems with Big Government economic theory, I don’t know what does.
Truthfully, no amount of money would have cured Hank’s woes. The gub’mint could have given him $9,000 or even $9 million a month and he’d still be in the same predicament: sitting in a useless group therapy session, complaining about how it was someone else’s fault that he was down on his luck.
Hank wasn’t the only example I saw that month. There was also “Pete.” Pete cashed his gub’mint check on the third of every month and happily accepted the $900 that was stolen from his fellow citizens for the stated purpose of assisting him with food and shelter so that he wouldn’t starve or freeze to death. Pete then skipped on down to the closest bar and grill with his fistful of money and purchased alcohol and drugs.
For two or three days, he reveled in a glorious bacchanalian binge that would end abruptly when the money ran out. Then Pete faced a dilemma. He had no money to pay his rent and therefore no shelter from the harsh New York winter. He had no money to purchase food and therefore faced hunger and possibly even starvation. What was a guy to do?
Well, Pete was quite resourceful. He would go to the nearest emergency room and tell the doctors he was “hearing voices.” Pete had learned that that was a surefire way to gain admission to the hospital. And just think of all the fringe benefits! Free food. Your own warm and cozy room. Free cable TV. An adjustable bed. A cleaning crew to keep your room spic and span. Room service! Cool psychedelic medicines, aimed at stopping those pesky voices you’re hearing, but having a pleasant side effect of making you feel good.
Pete would dutifully play his part. He’d attend “group” whenever asked. He would take all his meds and act respectfully to the doctors, nurses, and medical students like me when they visited him every day. Then, near the end of the month, the voices would miraculously dissipate. He’d be discharged from the hospital just in time to mosey down to the post office and claim his next gub’mint check.
I’m not sure why, but one day Pete brazenly admitted his scheme to me. I immediately marched down the hall and, as I searched for the doctor in charge, dreamt about what would transpire. I smiled in my mind’s eye as I imagined Pete getting tossed out to the hospital’s back alley by a couple of big, burly bouncer types. I imagined him near tears as his precious gub’mint money dried up. I could just see him sporting that bright orange vest as he picked up trash—judge’s orders—in a futile attempt to pay back his fellow citizens for all the ill-gotten money he’d wasted. I wanted to be there when that same judge cut up his Medicaid insurance card that paid for his monthly hospital visits—and sprinkle its remnants like confetti onto the courtroom floor.
Sadly, the opposite happened. The attending physician just laughed when I told him what Pete had confessed to me. “You have to respect his ingenuity,” was all he said. Pete was allowed to continue on his merry way and is probably still running the same scam in some hospital right now. I wish Pete’s story was my only example of this type of behavior, but there are countless others. I’ve been a doctor for almost 20 years, and I still see examples every day.
I learned a lot during my time on the psychiatric ward. Not about psychiatry, heavens no… I barely learned anything about psychiatry. But I did learn a lot about economics and the reality of what the workers and producers are up against. The users and abusers are out there; they are clever and resourceful, and they’re being propped up by politicians in Washington. Most aren’t as brazen and obvious as Pete, but almost all of them share Hank’s warped sense of external blame coupled with that self-destructive specter of passive dependence and entitlement.
And—thanks to the policies of our Big Government leaders—we are breeding more and more of this poisonous mentality.
Jeffrey Green, MD, is a 43-year-old family physician who owns a private medical practice in a small town in Kentucky. He attended Johns Hopkins University for undergraduate school and SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY, for medical school.
No comments:
Post a Comment