Here in the US there is a lot of talk about personal responsibility, you hear about it all the time and it's a favorite political football. Now I'm all in favor of personal responsibility, I really am, in the UK there is not enough talk about it, it's not something that is instilled in the mind of the young and as a result we have generations of people utterly dependent on the welfare state with no expectations or even desire to stand on their own two feet. I remember when I worked in Portsmouth I would regularly catch the train to London, to get to the station I would walk past the social security crisis loan office, normally around 9am, there was always a motley collection of young girls with baby buggy's and loathsome looking lads wearing the ubiquitous track suit with their hair gelled flat and shaped into a ridiculous sticky fringe that looked like it had been drawn on with a sharpie. These losers would be standing around (not working being the given) sometimes with a beer, always with a extra long cigarette (it's me only pleasure innit?) waiting on a "crisis loan" whatever that is, must be a pretty big crisis though, I mean it's got these useless wankers out onto the street and away from Jerry Springer at the ungodly hour of 9am. I have no time for these people, a complete sub culture of wasters and criminals, we even have a name for them, Chavs, a badge these cretins wear with pride.
So yes, I am all in favor of personal responsibility, but there's a problem, you see when people decide they don't want to take personal responsibility for their actions, there is a cost, and guess who gets to pay? Yep, you got it, the rest of us. You can see this everywhere, here in South Carolina if you live in an un-adopted part of the county (as I do) you don't get trash pickup as a matter of course, you have to pay for a private service, it's not a problem, it's not as if you get it free if you live in the city, you still pay for it, you just get it taken out of your taxes. But out in the sticks you have to make a conscious decision to contract a private company to collect your trash on a weekly basis, it's not expensive, maybe $25 every three months but it becomes your personal responsibility to organize the collection, or not...
If you decide you don't want the service you can either take your trash to the dump yourself, you can burn it or you can leave it laying around in stinking midden piles before dragging it into the woods or whatever, the price is unsightly piles of crap or poisonous and toxic fumes either way I pay, I pay by having my environment despoiled and let me tell you folks, there are plenty who think their freedom of choice allows them to mess up the environment because it's cheap. In the current financial mess there is a huge push by the campaigning right wing to get rid of expensive federal programs and organizations such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Rick Perry is confident that corporations can be trusted to police their own business but I'm not so sure, in fact I would go as far as to say that the bottom line and upper management bonuses really trump all else.
Of course the big one is health insurance, in an ideal world we would all have health insurance, but we don't, in fact a large number of US citizens are completely uninsured, now the numbers vary but most estimates are around the 45 million mark. A significant number of these perhaps as many as 15 million can afford to take out insurance but choose not to, it's their choice, their personal responsibility, but it's our cost, because when they get treated in the ER the facility has to pass the cost onto those who are insured, this is why when my family had cause to use the ER for a broken arm the cost was in excess of $20,000. The ambulance ride alone was $850, this for a 15 minute ride, I was astonished when I saw what my insurance company was being billed and the county ambulance service actually loses money at those rates, why? because less than 50% of people who use the service actually pay.
I know that a lot of people can't afford health insurance, that's a whole different sad story but we also have a huge problem with people choosing not to exercise personal responsibility because they know that in the end someone else will pay. So we need to make them take that personal responsibility and the only way I know is to treat health insurance like a tax, take a little from everyone and spread the cost, I don't care if it's done at a federal or state level (federal would make more fiscal sense but lets not upset too many people at once) Now I know it's not in the constitution to provide health care to the people but then neither is sending men to the moon, besides we're already doing it we're just not spreading the cost fairly. If we can't trust people to dispose of their garbage properly then we sure as hell can't trust them to pay their fair share of ridiculously high medical costs, unfortunately the U in USA doesn't stand for utopia.
Rant Over
