Thoughts

I heard a comment the other day that can be rephrased as a standard appeal to Puritan ethics: people do not want their money taken away and redistributed. This means that at least some well-off people believe that anybody who is in a bad financial situation got there because they didn’t work hard enough, tried hard enough, or whatever.

A day before I heard this comment, I talked to my friend, who is a retired special ed teacher. She worked all her life in a most noble profession. Still, she doesn’t have enough retirement income and has to work part-time, not because she wants to do something, but because without this extra income, it would be difficult for her to make ends meet. And that’s where I have a problem with the “it’s all their own fault” statement. There are many professions, many jobs like this. And we need to raise taxes to pay teaches salaries and pensions. And if we reduce public education to a level low enough that people who can afford a private education would opt for it, this will completely eliminate the concept of “equal opportunities” (yes, we already have districts with low education quality, but we should put an effort into resolving these problems, not exacerbating them).

I didn’t even start on another topic: even if somebody “didn’t work hard enough” or “didn’t save enough” is it morally acceptable to leave them without support when they need it?

And a final note, which should have probablybeen the first one. I hear people saying that they chose “the lesser of two evils.” What I do not understand it how these “evils” can be compared in terms “more” or “less.” They are very distinct, I would say, the opposite evils, meaning that you either find Trump’s policies evil or Kamala’s policies evil, that are not comparable in my opinion, which makes me think that people who choose “the lesser evil” do not really look in-depth on what they are choosing.

But I might be wrong as usual.