I know how tedious stories of injustice are, and how depressing, especially here in America where we are by nature optimists.  You know, how many times can you hear about millions of indigent senior citizens being cut back from five Meals-on-wheels a week to four due to Sequestration, or the precocious little four year-old in Indiana whose mother can’t break it to him that he was lotteried out of Head Start next term, before you turn to the sports channel, or go shopping, or see what there is to snack on?

Or reading about some freshman  Congressman from Tennessee, let’s say, whose family owns a gigantic farm, and who gets a subsidy of $738 a day, (and, yes, some liberal prick actually took out a calculator and divided the average annual $269,000 farm subsidy this wealthy public servant gets into days…) while he advocates cutting the Food Stamp program that so many WalMart employees depend on?  (A more balanced, and almost incomprehensible, version of that story is here)

There’s a so-called debate in this country about values.  One side’s intellectuals cite the points made by a novelist who escaped from totalitarianism and had a lifelong hatred of “altruism” as though these strongly expressed opinions are slam dunk conclusions preempting any discussion of who deserves what.   The intellectuals of the other major party  dare not scream too loud at this, fundraising is a delicate art that must be constantly cultivated, and besides, most of the money in political campaigns is given by the top half of the 1%, and not all of them think that novelist Ayn Rand is an absurd source of moral, political and economic philosophy.

I may personally agree that it’s no sin for old people to cut back from five meals a week to four.  America has an obesity problem, you know?  I may agree that the brat in Indiana who wants to continue in Head Start when politicians have agreed to cut it across the board as part of their debate over who deserves what should stop whining, and so should his mother.  But if I do those things, I’m a bad person.  Really, think about it.  It’s only my opinion, but someone who justifies cutting food to the poor, on a philosophical theory about who deserves what, in a super-wealthy country where the wealthiest continue to grow wealthier while everyone else does not– bad person.

Of course, there is no law against being a bad person.  Nor about a bad person being an elected public servant, leaving office and working for an average of 1000% more in the private sector as a lobbyist.   And I know it sounds terrible when you use a number like 1000%, it’s really only ten times as much.  If you take the actual numbers, it doesn’t really look so bad at all.  The public servant makes, say, $120,000 a year to serve, that servant can make much more in the private sector, but they make a sacrifice in pay in order to serve the rest of us.  So is it so unfair that the public servant leaves office with contacts, entree and expertise and makes $1,200,000 as a lobbyist?  If you look at it like that, it hardly seems unfair.  Look at it this way, it’s like the person only made $660,000 a year for those two years, only $480,000 a year if you divide by three with two years of public service, hardly a top earner in the USA.

I know, I know, prepare the eye roll.  Here we go, I’m done now — and may we have…. an eye roll.