Ever Notice...?

      Have you noticed how much political talk involves resentment at someone else's good fortune?  From communism's class warfare to conservatives griping about student loan forgiveness, it's not even so much that the complainer (or worse) has gotten a raw deal as it is that someone else has done better, by chance, skill or government whim.

     It's whiny.  It's immature.  Even when people pushing such notions try to give them some sort of moral or socioeconomic justification, it's still a child vexed because Billy-Sue across the street has ice cream and they don't, or a primate screeching because another member of the troop found ripe berries first and ate them all.

      A boon to others is not the same as a harm done to you.  Is it fair that somebody gets something nice and you do not?  Nope.  Life isn't fair.  Nature isn't fair.  And the better angels of our nature do impel us to work for fair and proportionate outcomes for our fellow humans.  But the part of us that wants to throw a tantrum because we didn't get what that other person has got is in no wise a better angel.  It's an undisciplined child.

     (A lot of comments coming in of the "Why should the rest of us pay someone else's barber-college bill?"  I dunno.  Nobody consulted me on it.  I have never been entirely sure why I had to pay for foreign wars I didn't want or government programs I disapproved of, either, but as long as I want to live under this flag, them's the breaks.  Federal debt is already an enormous burden on every taxpayer -- so huge that adding the loan payoff barely registers.  IMO, Uncle Sam now has every reason to turn and go after getting money back from colleges and trade schools that pulled in unprepared students for that sweet, sweet student loan money. Not that they will.  But in the grand scheme of things, do you want the beauty-school dropouts and community-college failures knocking over liquor stores and running phone scams to pay off their loans or dodging them forever in the shadow economy, or do you want them working jobs nearly as honest as yours and able to pay a little tax?  Remember, if you line them up and march them into the sea, those loans will never be repaid at all!)