I hope that you will consider this as a response to Mr. Wetherington’s recent opinion piece on “Social justice.” I am sure Mr. Wetherington is a good and decent man and firmly believes he is on the side of the angels in his recent piece, but I feel obligated to respond. In the current day to say that government is not the problem in our country is, at the least, naive.

Mr. W. contends that regulation was brought on by the greed of the evil corporations. Early in the 20th century there was some truth to this contention. He contends that the regulations our government shoves down the throat of business and private citizens is all good because it results in social justice, which in my book is a code word for redistribution of wealth. But that is not the subject I want to address now. We will discuss what is just and unjust about taking from those who work hard, follow the rules and try to provide a better life for their kids and giving it to folks who show a complete lack of responsibility for their own lives and their children and fellow citizens. That is a subject for another day.

Let us first talk about the problem of government. Our Congress has become a monkey house in a governmental zoo. It is filled with career politicians who have gerrymandered their districts in such a way (look at the map of the districts in Georgia) that over 80 percent of the districts are now safe from a challenge to the incumbent. These bozos now answer to no one because their district is safe. Since they are safe they line their pockets with special interest money and pad their future with outrageous pension and health care benefits paid for, but not available to the rest of us.

And what do these clowns do for us? They do the sort of things that Mr. W. encourages. They regulate and they take control of things that may better be served by private industry. They misuse the hard-earned tax dollars confiscated from the American people. This year Social Security starts paying out more than it is taking in. Medicare and Medicaid are already in deficit spending and the unfunded liability for those programs is $73 trillion. Government took over after Amtrak “just for a short time period” and continues to run a deficit on it decades after that takeover took place.

Total unfunded liabilities for the U.S. government now are estimated at $105 trillion and our total public and private assets (all we own or have saved) are estimated to be $73 trillion. Government is trying to pass a cap and trade bill which Obama himself said would cause electric bills to “skyrocket.” The latest estimate (which is always low) is that the bill will cause the average household of four to have an increase in the neighborhood of $1,700 per year in their utility bills.

We are doing this because the Green lobbyists and companies like GE will reap large benefits. They tell us that we are doing this for Social Justice reasons... to save the planet and because we, the rich nations, are causing global warming. Folks, we just had the coolest year in decades. The weather channel can’t predict the weather a week in advance or tell us how many hurricanes we are going to have this year and yet we are going to collapse our economy based on these experts. If government is not the problem, tell me, Mr. W., how we dig out of this hole these folks have dug in which to bury us and our children’s and grandchildren’s futures.

Let’s look at a couple of more regulatory areas. We regulated the auto industry and passed “social justice” rules so that our auto companies could no longer compete. Kowtowing to labor union demands for justice sure did a lot for the auto industries and steel industries up North. We did a lot of good justice-type stuff for Detroit. Now it is a shell of a city with one of the highest unemployment and crime rates in the nation.

Look at the food industry. One of the largest groups of lobbyists in the country is in this area. Do you think they are lobbying against regulations? Surprisingly, many of the large food corporations are lobbying for more. Why would you think that would happen? They can afford to handle the regulations whereas smaller companies cannot handle all the nuisance regulations in that and other industres. The big guys pay off your “representatives” to “protect” you from all this “unsafe” food out there and the end result is the big guys and your representatives increase their monopoly on power. How is that social justice for any of us?

Let’s look at the “cash for clunkers” fiasco. A guy trades in a 15 mpg car for a 25 mpg car and drives 12,000 miles in a year. He reduces U.S. gas consumption by 320 gallons a year. If you multiply that by 700,000 vehicles, that is 224 million gallons of gas saved a year which equals a little over 5 million barrels of oil which is 1/4 of one day’s U.S. consumption. That would cost about $350 million at $75 a barrel. So, in the interest of worldwide social justice (remember we are the the bad old baddies in the global warming scam), we spend $3 billion to save $350 million. So by the time we recover our $3 billion, the cars that were bought are clunkers again. And the beat goes on.

One final big social justice boondoggle was in the housing industry. The government (Congress/Clinton and Bush) sought to increase, through REGULATION, home ownership by those who could not afford to own homes. They, along with ACORN, pushed many lending institutions to loan money to folks who would never be able to repay the loans. Long story short, this led to the collapse of the housing industry and much of the economic problems we now have. Barney Frank, a fool of a congressman who gets re-elected from one of those safe districts, was a major culprit... AND WANTS TO DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN!

Government in the form of the elitists in Washington who are no longer in touch with the wants or needs of the American citizens is the problem. Reagan was right, but so was Pogo. “We have met the enemy and he is us.” As long as we continue to swallow the “we are doing this for your own good” pablum that most politicians can give out in their sleep and not examine the results of their own actions, we will continue this slippery slide to political, economic and moral bankruptcy the nation is now on.

Terry L. Taylor

Tifton