Lefty Lifestyles Of The Rich And Cheap

YOU assume that lefty writer Barbara Ehrenreich is, what the Forsytes would call, a warm woman. Her best-selling travelogue of working with the minimum-wage set, Nickeled and Dimed, has made her more than nickels and dimes. It is said to be required reading in freshman orientation at several colleges. So when her son Ben Ehrenreich decides that “we” can’t afford the cost of fixing a broken ankle, you have to wonder. Says Ben:

My girlfriend had broken her ankle and needed surgery. She was between jobs and between health insurance plans. We couldn’t afford the thousands of dollars the surgery would have cost at a private hospital. So I bundled her up at 4 o’clock one cold morning in January, drove to Boyle Heights and checked her in at the emergency room at L.A. County-USC.

Now I always thought that the practical reason for family was the security of people who care about you. When a member of the family hits a pothole then the family rallies round to help fix the jalopy.

But apparently not in the Ehrenreich clan. And apparently Ben’s girl friend didn’t think to avail herself of the opportunity of continuing to pay for her health insurance while she was “between jobs.” And apparently Ben didn’t offer to pay for her hospital bills.

What is it about these progressives? Look at the chain of irresponsibility here. First of all you have the girl friend, who doesn’t think it worthwhile to continue her health insurance payments. She is too cheap to make a proper provision for accident or ill health.

Then you have Ben, a journalist and novelist, presumably enjoying the favors of this young woman. He is too cheap to help out the woman with whom, Planned Parenthood aside, he could at any moment share the blessings of future parenthood.

And what about mother Barbara, the successful writer of left-wing bestsellers? Where was she while all this was going on?

Why do these wealthy, educated left-wing people expect us to pay for their health care?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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