The same ole New Year on the Left

It's New Years day and the leftist Detroit Free Press is at it again. The Freep's chief political cartoonist Mike Thompson presents his Auld Lang Syne year in review with a collection of past cartoons. One of them shows a family of four in a sedan with dad driving, mom next to him and what seems to be a daughter and son in the back seat and a small dog sticking his head out the window all of whom are smiling except the dog. This I presume is supposed to represent the traditional American family.

But in front of that car we see eight adults and two children standing in line just below a sign saying "Flint Bottled Water Distribution" with an arrow pointing the way. None of these people are smiling. In the upper right hand corner are the words written in cursive: "There's no way like the American way."

These two images together are conveying the notion that the American way is to go from having Happiness-the smiling faces, and having independence-driving the family car, to unhappiness-no smiling faces-and dependence, standing in line for emergency charity. So the American way is to go from happiness to unhappiness.

There is a lot of truth to this cartoon though I don't think its the truth Mr Thompson wants his readers to glean. The truth is that the traditional American family existed in an era of more political freedom, that is to say less government control and more self reliance.

But since the sixties that 'American way' has been reversed. Today we are constantly advised by the chattering class that it is wise, nay even morally ideal, to place all our economic needs--not just political ones--in the hands of government controllers. And I say it is the government control of the water supply that is responsible for the disaster in Flint.

On that note I just want to point to all that clean water being trucked into Flint. Why is it clean? Because it is produced by big, huge, giant corporations in business to make profits. They have the economies of scale that allow them to bring massive amounts of water, that small mom and pop businesses could not match, to those who need it.  They can't afford to poison their customers even accidentally. They would lose too much money. Government doesn't face that prospect.

So, the lesson to be drawn from Mr Thompson's cartoon is that the modern American way of trusting government to provide for our economic needs is unwise, nay even morally wrong. Thus the resolution we should all make for 2017 is to work hard to remove government from our economic needs and urge Mike Thompson and the Detroit Free Press to join us in that endeavor.