SAME STAFF, NEW JOBS

I’ve had another of my hare brained (or is that hair brained) ideas that are born of two examples of the US government’s being run by dollars and sense is just small change. One of the biggest costs of health care, the bureaucratic staff who make the eligibility decisions, is unneeded in a single payer system, more than compensating for the increase in service given. One of the arguments against such sense, made by insurance’s congressional shill’s is that saving money by ending useless jobs is somehow cruel to the people hiding in them.

My suggestion is that rather than pink slipping these paper pushers we just start giving them new application forms to play little Caesar with. These would be applications for eligibility for continued future use in a petroleum independent economy. There is no necessary evil we must embrace, lest it be our need to be served we cannot face. Shedding the spoiled skin of what I’ve come to call wastern civilization (the happy accident of a typo) is the end of a dream become nightmare.

In youth we feel richer for every new illusion; in maturer years, for every one we lose. -Madame Anne Sophie Swetchine, mystic (1782-1857)

The entire government is elected by people living next to an oil refinery and breathing the toxic fumes emanating therefrom, saying “I know it’s terrible, but it’s the smell of money.” They're just an exaggeration of our own corruption. There is no anarchist meeting at which we all get better together — individual integrity revolts when it will.

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Relevant addendum: Something to emphasize the contribution individuals make to the problems for which we like to blame the corporation that we support with our money — The entire amount of oil spilled in the Gulf of Mexico this summer amounts to that required to produce just one day's worth of plastic in bottled water, as ubiquitous as cell phones.