Slamming back at Joe the Republican

Many folks have read the story of "Joe the Republican". The 'self made' man who goes through the day enjoying benefits that his government (mainly through progressive policies) have provided. Below is a retort from a conservative to the points in the tale. I've decided to offer my own response to the retorts....(The original text is in italics, the conservative retort is after, and my comment is in bold)

“Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.”

Unfortunately, if Joe is in his forties or older, he is extremely likely to have one or more medical conditions for which no effective medication yet exists thanks to those same stupid commie liberals that introduced huge delays in every step of the process of technological advancement in the drug industry, and prevented a large number of development projects that would have been judged as a good risk had the costs of the whole enterprise not been jacked up so outrageously.

Now let's set the record straight...our government (we the people) not only try to keep us safe from risky drugs that can hurt or kill us, but the fact is that almost 30% of the funding for all drug R&D comes from...you guessed it..the government through the National Institutes for Health (NIH)! In 2000, a report from from a Joint Economic Committee of Congress outlined the benefits of NIH research. It noted that some econometric studies had given its research, which was funded at $16 billion a year in 2000, a rate of return of 25 to 40 percent per year. It also found that of the 21 drugs with the highest therapeutic impact on society introduced between 1965 and 1992, public funding was "instrumental" for 15. So let's move on to our next screed.




“All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance — now Joe gets it too.”

Yeah, he gets it all right. Of course, he gets paid medical insurance in lieu of cash mainly because they’re taxed differently, which in turn evolved out of attempts by productive enterprises to evade price controls imposed by one of the heroes of the left, and the results are less than inspiring. This is generally referred to as a failure of the “free market” by people dedicated to keeping the Big Lie going for yet another century.


Tsk, tsk....again, our conservative get's it all wrong. Everyone with a brain knows that insurance works cause it spreads the risk out over the greatest number of people therefore keeping costs down. That's why we need to get ALL americans covered by insurance so the costs for everyone stays DOWN! Of course, our retorter above would like to have you believe that for-profit insurance (aka the free market) is the best way to go since it's so much less expens.....wait a minute...LESS EXPENSIVE??? Now let me see...Medicare adminsitrative overhead costs aroudn 3-5%. No profits, no dividends, solid basic coverage. For profit insurance adminsitrative overhead costs 18-22%, dividends paid to shareholders, and CEO's like "Diamond" Bill McQuire get compensated to the tune of $1.1 BILLION DOLLARS!!!
Moving on....

“He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.”

You mean like the ones that prevent those evil meat-packers from more rigorously testing their cows for Mad Cow disease? Gee thanks.


Now this one's a no-brainer. Since Reagan and especially lovable Dan Quayle, we stopped fully funding our USDA inspectors and...get this...let the industry regulate it self!!! Hmmm...sounds like a winner...FOR THE INDUSTRY!
More, please...

“Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for the laws to stop industries from polluting our air.”

Of course it would be even cleaner if those same environmentalist wacko liberals hadn’t also fought to stop new nuclear plants from producing electricity without polluting the air.


He tee's it up and it's hit over the wall. Now about that pesky nuclear (or nucular) waste problem.
Next...


“Joe begins his workday. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards.”

No, the unions did not produce Joe’s high pay or any of his benefits. The technological advancements over the intervening decades allow huge amounts of wealth to be created with comparatively little effort - this means that Joe’s efforts, modest as they are compared to the strenuous efforts of his ancestors, create huge amounts of value, for which he is paid commensurately. Some of that pay is in the form of benefits - they are instead of, not in addition to, a portion of the cash that he would otherwise receive in payment, and to the extent that our friends on the left caused a substitution of benefits for cash that Joe would not have chosen on his own, they have made him worse off.

All the unions did was form cartels and use the threat of violence to keep competitors at bay and extort some wealth from the capitalists. The amount of wealth that could possibly have been obtained from capitalists in this manner is a tiny, insignificant fraction of the huge gains in wealth and income that people in every walk of life have enjoyed since the unions began doing this, so it is mathematically impossible for those unions to be responsible for the current affluence of the non-wealthy.


Ahh, yes...the conservatives wishful desire to go back to the days when sweatshops abounded, children toiled in factories, and 'capitalists' reaped the dividends. Look, organized labor gave and gives a voice to millions of wage earners who never had one before. And remember what Abe Lincoln said: "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration." So capitalism doesn't even exist without labor. And here’s another Republican’s opinion on organized labor…
If I were an employee, a working man ... or a wage-earner of any sort, I undoubtedly would join a union of my trade... I believe in the union and I believe that all men are morally bound to help to the extent of their powers in the common interests advanced by the union.
– Theodore Roosevelt
Onward...


“Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe also forgets that in addition to his federally subsidized student loans, he attended a state-funded university.”

And thanks to the subsidies that encouraged millions of his competitors to pursue courses of education that would otherwise be a losing investment (actually, such courses were still losing investments - the taxpayers covered the losses), Joe had to go to college himself just to keep up with the competition, even if the courses he took contributed little to his ability to actually do the work and added little value to himself or his employer. The fact that his employer could be taken to court if someone with a college degree was passed over in favor of someone of a different race with only a high school diploma makes employers more likely to require this paper regardless of its relation to the actual work. Finally, the real value of the high school diploma, and the level of useful knowledge and ability it represents, has been declining for quite a while, meaning that Joe had to waste part of his adult life learning things that he should have learned during his childhood. And, the more that “worker protections” make it difficult and expensive to fire people, the less willing any employer is going to be to give someone with little experience a shot without impressive credentials; if it’s difficult and expensive to fire someone, you’d better not hire someone unless you’re sure he’s going to work out.

Which means that not only is Joe out four years of his own life and thousands of dollars, he’s also likely stuck supporting his own kids well into their early adult years, and he spends his nights worrying that one of his kids will not manage to get through nearly a decade of her prime reproductive years without derailing the required long course of education with a pregnancy.


Man...this guy is hard core! Actually, I agree with one thing...Joe is out thousands of dollars for his education. Wasn't it Thomas Jefferson that built the University of Virginia as a school of higher education that was FREE???? Jefferson was a staunch advocate of free public education. Jefferson promoted studies of natural history, botany, archeology, and architecture. Aside from that, I guess "impressive credentials" are something to be laughed at.

“It is noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.”

Of course those unscrupulous bankers worked for the Federal Reserve.


And last time I looked, the Federal Reserve was NOT a formal part of the federal government! Maybe the writer believes as I do that the managing/printing of our currency should be returned to our government and we should abolish the Fed Reserve!


“Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards to go along with the taxpayer funded roads.”

And if he brings his small child with him, that child has to sit in the back seat because some America-hating liberal fought for a car “safety” device that endangers small passengers sitting near it, and refuse to this day to rescind this decree, insisting instead that it is Joe’s place to adjust to the whims of bureaucrats by moving his child out of the path of the explosive device rather than the bureaucrats’ place to adjust to their own mistake by allowing Joe to switch the damned thing off when appropriate.

That's it? That's all you got about auto safety?? A car seat? And I guess you don't like those taxpayer funded highways that a Republican president rammed through!




“He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to. ”

Joe isn’t helping to take care of his father? I’d say he’s chipping in to the tune of 15% of his paycheck. And his father depends for part of his livelihood on the financial health of a company that he no longer works for, because wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberals encouraged them to withhold part of his pay and only give it to him after he retired, assuming it still existed. Gee, thanks. And if it wasn’t for the damned FDA (see above), I’d bet serious money that Joe’s father would be healthy enough to keep working, and he’d be facing a long enough life expectancy that permanent retirement would be ludicrously expensive and completely out of the question at his youthful age unless he was unusually wealthy.


(sigh)…

Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn't mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: "We don't need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I'm a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.





I’ll finish with more from Teddy

No man can be a good citizen unless he has a wage more than sufficient to cover the bare cost of living, and hours of labor short enough so that after his day's work is done he will have time and energy to bear his share in the management of the community, to help in carrying the general load. We keep countless men from being good citizens by the conditions of life with which we surround them. We need comprehensive workmen's compensation acts, both State and national laws to regulate child labor and work for women, and, especially, we need in our common schools not merely education in booklearning, but also practical training for daily life and work. We need to enforce better sanitary conditions for our workers and to extend the use of safety appliances for our workers in industry and commerce, both within and between the States.
– Theodore Roosevelt, speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, "The New Nationalism" (August 31, 1910)

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.
– Theodore Roosevelt, speech at Asheville, North Carolina (September 9, 1902)