Homestead mailing list

[Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

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.