Just pick up a shovel

Just pick up a shovel

EDITOR:

Recently, I had the opportunity to read TIME. What I found was report after report about how some remote area of some remote country is ripe for the picking by some terrorist group. Why? Because their government hasn’t done enough to satisfy their economic needs. So, instead of picking up a shovel and digging a foundation, or diverting a stream, or sinking a well, or planting a seed, they choose to pick up a gun and kill their neighbor.

What motivates people to sit around waiting for government to do for them when they can do for themselves and then turn to violence when that magical elixir doesn’t arrive? The answer escapes many Americans. It especially escapes them when the question arises in their own country. The recent passage of the health care bill in the House is a prime example.

Make no mistake; the health care bill is not about improving the health of the American people. If it was, it would be filled with shovels like tort reform, government run health clinics, and access to Medicare/Medicaid for pre-existing conditions. Instead it is filled with guns like reduced payments to doctors, limited access to services, mandates, taxes and penalties. It is simply a wealth and power grab by a bunch of Socialists and their ardent sympathizers.

The Liberals pushing this legislation would rather vilify insurance companies, which brought affordable health care to 85 percent of the American people, than show any distrust of Socialist government, which, since the French Revolution, has brought us the guillotine, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot. Socialism/Communism has been a failure for most of the people who have been forced to endure it. But apparently history means nothing to these angry tools of the Socialist cause.

Maybe things will be different this time. Maybe American Socialists will be different than Russian or Chinese or Cambodian Socialists. Maybe that is their “Hope,” that these new Socialists have “Changed.”

THOMAS MASKELL

Poland