BSO: What is Hyp?

Here's a reprint of my response to someone suggesting that I might be a hypocrite.

Anonymous asked: Why are you so against affordable health care for the poor, when you took advantage of free health care/ mental health care from Massachusetts when you finally sought help for your drug addictions? Or are you still a "Do as I say, not as I do" kind of person?

Huh? When did I ever say I was against affordable health care for the poor? The surest way to get the best health care (or anything else for that matter) for the most people at the most affordable price is to allow providers to compete with one another for customers. Therefore, I support a medicinal free market undistorted by anti-competitive government interference. The best thing we can do for those who can’t afford health care is to eliminate the government’s distorting and monopolistic role so that competition can drive prices back down to affordable levels.

Your second question is phrased too narrowly. I did not just receive mental health services from the government, I have literally been at one time or another on virtually every welfare program there is, including a few that no longer exist. When I talk about the welfare system, I am not speaking about things I learned at political rallies, or that were told to me by college professors, or by a left or right wing think tank, or by reading Charles Dickens or Ayn Rand. My opinions are based upon the facts of experience that I acquired as they occurred right in front of my face from the vantage point of the belly of the beast.

People sometimes ask me what I’ve learned from my journey through every level of the welfare system, as I observed it from the inside out and from the bottom up. I tell them that I’ve learned the importance of being of service to people on as close to a one on one basis as you can as opposed to government programs. That is why for many years I preferred to help the poor by interacting with them on a direct one on one basis by volunteering at the Amherst Survival Center.

Amusingly, despite my long record of unpaid personal service to the disadvantaged, I sometimes find myself being lectured to about service to the poor by lefties whose only act of public service is to vote a straight Democratic ticket once a year. Sometimes I see such liberals waving signs in front of City Hall, but I do not see them working in the soup kitchens. Yet I am sometimes told, by people who never saw me when I was a heavily sedated patient on Ward 5, that I don’t understand what it means to be at the bottom of society.

But even if you expand your question to more accurately reflect the full range of my in depth, experience-based knowledge of the welfare system, the question itself is nonsense. Of course I never experienced a single twinge of guilt while on welfare nor felt myself acting in any way hypocritically. Why would I?

I have paid many thousands of dollars in taxes over my lifetime. Don’t we always hear that we pay for these programs so that they will be there if we ever need them? Or are some people supposed to only pay for the programs, but never receive anything from them? Are those programs intended only for leftists? Do you lose your right to complain about incompetence or waste in the welfare system if you ever take advantage of it? Isn’t someone like me, who has actually been through the welfare system, more qualified to evaluate that system than the average person? I can't tell whether your question is an attempt to be silly or is simply mean spirited, but thanks anyway for asking.

A rainbow appeared over downtown Northampton a few days ago.