The only guarantee in life is the difficulty inherent in living. No matter from what circumstances they derive, all people are tightrope walking across the void with the inescapable inevitability of oblivion awaiting just that one misstep to claim yet another victim of entropy. This is the natural state of man, said Hobbes, and all data gathered since has tended to back him up.
The history of civilization is written in the blood and sweat of the masses. The bulk of mankind's time as the apex predator can be typified by the predations of a very few upon the very many. The benefits accrued to all the greatest societies have always gone to those who need them the least. However, despite this very demonstrable fact, the romantic inclinations of a long pedigree of wingnuts and cranks have caused them to agitate and foment internecine warfare on behalf of the plutocrats upon whose table scraps they survive. America is only the latest nation to find the politics of division working to the benefit of the aristocracy.
Which is why, when I encounter an ardent wingnut whose ability to speak upon any subject is predicated on the notion that government is always the problem, and every program from which they do not derive direct benefit is just more wasted money. Compassion for one's fellow citizen is a sign of weakness or naiveté, and advocates for the power of government to work as a force for good in the lives of all Americans is evidence either of one's own status as a recipient of such programs, or a sign that one is duped. No other possibility exists in the deadlocked purview of those addicted to confirmation bias.
You can never convince a wingnut that any government program that isn't putting a check in their own mailbox might actually provide some value. These are people who embrace the solitude, poverty, nastiness, brutality, and fleeting nature of the Hobbesian life. Society is only another word for imposition to people who have no inclination to aid their fellow man, and yet are the first to cry out for help when life does for them as it does for everyone.
Whether it's Rick Perry's 9,000 wildfires, Paul Ryan trying to destroy the program that put him through college, Michele Bachmann railing against the Medicaid that keeps the lights on in her big gay husband's pray-the-gay-away clinic, or any of the public hypocrites who continually claim that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had no effect upon the economy while simultaneously writing letters requesting ARRA funds because they will create jobs and economic stimulus in their home districts, these people only care about their own selves. And the fact is, none of them will ever need Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the Veterans' Administration, or any of the other government programs designed to make life a bit less nasty, brutish, and short for the masses upon which these people feed. We're cattle to the likes of Rupert Murdoch, and when cattle get old or catch sick, you don't ease their burden, you put them out of their misery, right?
I've put together a list of government programs upon which poor and marginalized people rely for critical assistance that I've heard wingnuts call waste, or worse. I put it below the fold.
Universal Service Support
I'm sure most of you have heard about Obamaphone, the Federal program that throws money at the lazy, shiftless poor (blacks) by taking hard-earned tax dollars and buying cell phones for welfare recipients. Isn't that outrageous? How could anyone ever justify this?
Well, citizens of wingnuttistan, let me clear my throat. Even if one were only to stipulate the obvious necessity of phone service for, say, job seeking, it would seem like ensuring that people who we want to raise themselves up and get a job could be reached for interviews. I mean, if you don't have a phone, you probably don't have a job, amiright? And why a cell phone, you ask? Isn't that an extravagance?
Well, no. Cell phone's have one clear advantage over landlines that probably escapes the pampered sensibilities of those whose main concern is how to reconcile receiving government subsidies while denying them to everyone else: one need not have a home to own a cellphone. Think about it.
Medicare
In trying to sell Paul Ryan's abhorrent kill-Medicare-but-still-call-it-Medicare scheme to privatize the misery of the elderly and disabled, reliably stoopid Heritage Foundation stooges are lionizing the "successes" of unconscionable boondoggles, Medicare Advantage and Part D. The fact that is, a big chunk of Medicare's financial woes can be directly attributed to these programs, the massive unpaid for expansion into prescription drugs that forbade using the government's bulk purchasing power to negotiate lower prices especially.
The turn against Medicare by rank and file wingnuts is the most mystifying phenomenon I've ever encountered. Truthfully, there are not many Americans who won't need this program in their sunset years. And yet, somehow, the mouthbreather elite has managed to lasso the hardcore right, many of them nominally Christian, into agitating against the geriatric care they will never be able to purchase on their own when they need it. Weird.
Public Broadcasting
How could you not feel for the mild-mannered broadcasters who work in relative obscurity at National Public Radio. Sure, Neal Conan, the Magliozzi brothers, and Michele Norris are old friends to many of us, but your average wingnut can't be bothered to know anything about anything, ever, so why would they spend time listening to their idea of the devil, publically supported journalism? But the truth is, for many rural communities all over this incredibly large country, NPR is all the journalism they get, publically funded or not. Without Corporation for Public Broadcasting funds, many communities would have no means of keeping up with the world.
Ironically enough, the people who trust government the least are the people who want to leave its operations unscrutinized in large part by corporate media that tends to benefit from its corruption. At least with NPR, the funding is open and fully disclosed, the journalism is top notch, and most telling of all, the people who want it shut down are the people who run corporations that have media holdings.
"Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves, therefore, are its only safe depositories. And to render them safe, their minds must be improved to a certain degree." -- Thomas Jefferson
Social Security
But my all-time favorite wingnut meme is that the government program directly responsible for raising the living standard of the elderly all across America is in fact, a criminal scheme. Now, the obvious problem with this notion is that we have no Charles Ponzi to collect the excess lucre generated by the scheme. Is it the elderly beneficiaries? Well, nobody wins elections pounding on grandma and grandpa, so you won't find many wingnuts saying that they're the con artists responsible. Is it the Federal government? Well, this isn't too tough a sell for those who hate government, but it does present a dilemma, since these are the same exact people who claim government is broke and can no longer afford Social Security. If it's a Ponzi scheme, I say, isn't it so that we can't afford not to continue it? Bah! Cognitive dissonance!
Truthfully, though, nearly half of all elderly Americans rely completely upon their monthly Social Security check to live. It's not a supplement, or a bonus, but it is literally the money that allows them to continue eating and heating their homes...and keeping their homes. Before Social Security, it was a very, very bleak proposition, getting old. After? Well it's not all wine and roses, but at least it's not starvation and death from exposure. That's the strangest criminal enterprise in history, barring the saga of Robin Hood. Hey! Maybe all these wingnuts are actually trying, in their fumbling, unimaginative way, to compliment the system. Maybe it's more Errol Flynn than Charles Ponzi, right? I mean they're contemporaries, and we all know how much trouble wingnuts have with history. Though, personally, I prefer Cary Elwes, mainly for his shot at Kevin Costner's conspicuously absent accent. But that's just me.
Solitary, Poor, Nasty, Brutish, and Short
All of which brings me back 'round full circle. The individual life, the "natural life" described by Hobbes, and a century later by Thomas Paine, is the life of loners to whom the benefits of society are denied. This is the life to which wingnuts like Ron Paul wish to consign us all. A life circumscribed by scarcity, poverty, brutality, this is the natural conclusion inherent in the dissolution of the ties that bind us, each to each, in a civilized society. I forego my natural right to use my size and strength to take the things I need for survival in trade for the right to have the guarantee of food and shelter as minimal necessities. You give up the right to enforce justice upon those who have wronged you in return for an institution of laws. This is the tradeoff we make when we congregate into a society, and from it we all should receive the promise of a floor of experience below which we do not need fear sinking. Every citizen eats, has shelter, and has the hope of opportunity to improve their lot in a civilized society. For every person who starves, dies of exposure, lies paralyzed by hopelessness, or falls ill and dies from lack of treatment, our standing and our credibility falls by inches in a world in which our poor and middle class are attaining less than generations who came before, and our standard of living is dropping with every dollar hoovered upwards by plutocrats who will never need anything from the government they scorn. That is,until they do.