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  • From: Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Voting the pocketbook
  • Date: Sat, 04 Sep 2004 22:35:45 -0700

Walter H.Jeffries wrote:

On Sep 5, 2004, at 12:04 AM, Tvoivozhd wrote:

"Are you better off today than four years ago"


My family and I am, but it has nothing to do with Bush, his administration or Congress. I'm no fan of Bush. I wasn't a fan of Clinton either. Thank Dog that Tipper and Gore didn't get the Presidency even though it was a slight of hand. Mr. Greenspan if anybody should get more credit for the good of the economy than the President or Congress.

From the tone of your post that was not what you wanted to hear. But then I work for myself, homestead, homeschool and pay my own health insurance ($10,000 per person deductable - it is for emergancies, live healthy and work safely!) so I wouldn't lay the responsibility for how I am on anyone else. Frankly people need to take more responsibility for them selves and not rely on the government to pull them up.

tvoivozhd---no, there is nothing I want to hear and I couldn't care less whether anyone agrees with me ot not. Except for a very brief interval after graduating from college when I worked for an engine company to familiarize myself with engine design and sales practices, I have always owned my own business, sometimes in the U.S., sometimes in foreign countries, often with a very large financial reward. The large reward was nice, but a greater degree of control was the primary incentive---not total control, mind you, just greater control.. I like starting new businesses and the formula of success becomes somewhat automatic after the first one or two. I don't like the janitorial aspect of running one after the problems are mostly solved.

My boys all agree with me, two own their own business, the third did and made a ton of money with the first Computer Science degree at Illinois Institute of Technology, retired and now is back running IT operations for the Wisconsin Judiciary as a hobby, albeit a well-paid hobby. When it becomes boring (as it will), he will quit All are in the top income tax braclet. All home school only in the sense that they supplement public schooling, as my parents did when I was a child until I could take charge of my own education---fortunately including seven years of college in five years under the G.I. Bill---best investment and best return on investment the U.S. ever inadvertantly made. The numbers of home schoolers, 1.3 million at last count clearly indicate it is successful for small numbers of people who can and do devote a lot of personal time to their children and equally clearly indicate it is for a tiny minority unlikely to increase much among the population where both parents work---as I recall that is around sixty percent..

I was born a farmer and live on a farm ---prefer the farmer appellation to that of homesteader which can carry overtones of dilettante hobby farming. To me farming in the days of the Great Depression was sometimes enjoyable, sometimes a grim burden---can you envision two adults and one fourteen year old working like maniacs, milking fifty five cows by hand and getting back a ninety eight cent paycheck for two weeks labor? Of course you can't, nor can you appreciate the changes that have occurred in U.S. society since to make life for most people more tolerable than it was in the days before FDR replaced a Libertarian Hoover. I don't expect you to, you weren't there either in evil Hoover days or when they lightened up with government intervention...

I am not so ignorant to assume business success is wholly a personal achievement---it is largely a product of being surrounded by hundreds or thousands of (gasp) socialist devices that make a private enterprise possible. Living healthy and working safely is an admirable delusion. You do the best you can until you stop at a red light and the big truck behind you doesn't. Nobody controls the unknown descending upon you, nowadays usually in the form of disease, to which the cheapest response is
a really big insurance pool, the entire population in the form of Universal National Healthcare.. The knee-jerkers moan about the cost of Universal Healthcare averaging nine percent around the world. I don't, I go strictly by the numbers and moan about spending fifteen percent of U.S. GDP for less coverage---none for forty five million people and climbing each year.







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