Health Care, Unemployment, Welfare and Importing Resources

People are an economic resource.

If you do not take care of and use your economic resources your economy cannot expand. Period.

The argument about health care is a lot like the argument about oil drilling in Alaska or other locations.

You either take care of and use your economic resources or you don't.

People, land, oil or money in the bank. These things are only useful if you use them.

If you don't spend any money the money is as useless as if you don't own it. If you invest money, buy a company for example or some stock, you are using the money effectively. If you put money in the bank you give permission for the bank to lend it out to others. The money in the bank is useful because you are using it.

If you bury your money in the ground or shove it in your mattress it becomes useless.

Oil is the same way. In the ground it is useless.

People too, people who are not producing are useless. Worse, people who are not producing are a drain on the system.

We all know there are times when we are busy and times when we are not. Typically we do not manage our resources well during the times we are not busy.

Suppose you had a car that you drove every day for several years. One day you stop driving it and you put in in the garage. If you maintain that car while it is in the garage, charge the battery, etc, the car will work when you need it. If you don't maintain it the car will not work when you need it and you will have to get a new car and incur the costs associated with storing or recycling the old car.

People are the same way. We either maintain them, keep them sheltered, fed, clothed and healthy OR we live them to rot until we need them and when we need them they are not ready to be used so we have to import workers from other nations.

Then those workers get to a point where they are not useful right now so we repeat the cycle.

Essentially management blames the workers for not working when management (government) can't provide anything for them to do.

By importing long term labor to manage short term labor needs we are creating a long term burden on our society.

President Bush tried to address this very issue with a temporary worker visa. The problem is that once people are in the US they will typically stay. The temporary worker visa is a poor attempt at the solution because it ignores the resources currently available.

We need to give people the opportunity to work. The United States is a free nation. You are free to succeed, you should be free to starve. You should also be able to work at community service centers where you are put to work and if you need specific services you can get them, money, food, health care, etc.

The problem then becomes people treating each other like crap, the haves and have nots. If you are working at a community service center you are a have not and some of the bureaucrats will treat you like crap just because they can. It is this kind of "I can treat you like crap" that resulted in laws for civil rights and people still ignore those laws and treat each other like crap.

We have to retrain people to accept that everyone is just as important as everyone else. There are no people who are better than other people.

Today we just leave people to rot in poverty because we can't train people to treat each other decently and we don't want to make community service a condition of receiving social services.