It’s Only Yours if You Paid for It.
Lately, you hear a lot of people talk about things that have been taken from them. Somebody on the news tells you how the bank took their home, or the company took their health care, or outsourcing took their job.
All this “taking” can get a person riled up. And that’s what it’s meant to do. If you haven’t been able to tell by watching TV over the past year or so, you’re supposed to be mad as hell and not gonna take it no more! Who wouldn’t get angry about rights or possessions being taken away? As an American, with 232 years of heritage of fighting that sort of thing, you’re being drafted as a foot soldier each time you’re barraged with, “Somebody took “x” from me, and if you’re not careful, they’re coming for you, too!”
But who’s doing the real taking, and who has real ownership?
Granted, a lot of people are in real messes, and many of them were sold a bill of goods up front. It’s natural to have a sense of empathy, and even sympathy, for someone who seems to have drawn the short stick. But I stop short as viewing any of these folks as having been robbed. Why? The less, if any, of your money that went into something, the less you can claim ownership of it. To wit:
If you bought a house with no money down, you’re most likely a renter who had to do too much paperwork and who has a bank for a landlord. You may be viewed differently at tax time, but in the interim, you squandered your meager tax advantages in PMI payments and high interest. You are probably one of the people who was busy telling me earlier in the decade how I was throwing money away by renting. You had an obligation to research what you were doing, regardless of the sales pitches, and you refused to because you might have gotten answers you didn’t want to hear that would’ve spoiled doing what seemed “easy” at the time. Many of the people in this predicament aren’t even losing equity dollars, either because they never accrued any or because they took it out. Now, many of them will sit in a bank-owned house for the better part of a year paying nothing, simply using the time of the eviction process to live rent-free, and decry the unfairness of having something taken away. Who’s taking from whom?
If you’ve lost a job, you’ve got company out there. Was your job “taken” by outsourcing? If you hire landscaper “x” instead of landscaper “y”, did you take “y’s” job away? No, because you own the right to the work because you pay the money for it.
Speaking of work, if you give up a benefit or pay raise, or even have either cut, to keep a job, were these things taken? Again, the flow of the dollars says no. But the drumbeat of victims and politicians who seek to be saviors would have you believe these things belong to you as rights. Healthcare is a prime example, and wherein people realize the rising cost of it is bankrupting companies and the easy blame game against them is over, surely it must be a government-sponsored right. Those who propose that solution, government-sponsored and paid healthcare, ignore that such a solution is already largely in place—Medicare and Medicaid, which pay a majority of the healthcare costs in the country. It is this “ownership” by such a significant third party which causes your dollars to have so little significance in ownership, and therefore choice.
In almost all these matters, government used its enormous purchasing power to engineer political outcomes. Mortgage standards were eased for “fairness.” Confiscatory tax rates were imposed against businesses to pander for votes. Social services were offered to small groups that quickly became the bulk of the marketplace. All this from the one place that takes enough of your dollars that you should have a real ownership stake in—the government!
In every case, the one with the dollars AND the power to spend them gets the power of choice. To expand your power of choice, and your own freedom, you have to become financially independent. Essentially, this is a lesson every teenager learns. You can have a roof over your head and hot meals and every need taken care of, as a child, with a child’s rules. Or you can begin to take on more responsibility and earn more freedom. In fact, the adults I know who experience the most friction with their parents never completely became self-sufficient, and they are left to complain about influence of their parents in their adult lives. Just as with the teenager, we really only get one crack at self-sufficiency and freedom. In absence of our own will, other powers will gladly exercise the influence for us. This in turn makes it harder to become financially independent later. Money shares an equivalence with freedom. To gain and grow in either, you must have some of the other. If you squander either, don’t expect the few privileges you gain at another’s expense cannot be “taken away.”
Jared A. Chambers
