By MamaLiberty

Over and over we hear about things the government proposes (or actually does) to provide things that people need and want. I’m going to ignore, for now, a good many other problems and just deal with the “want and need” part.

In 1959, my family consisted of myself, a younger sister and our mother, a widow. We lived in a rather poor suburb of a relatively poor city in a duplex apartment, one of four sets. Mother earned our living managing a dry cleaning store. We did not suffer serious want, but we lived frugally and peacefully, in good relationship to our equally poor and peaceful neighbors. This was before much of the welfare, Medicare, Medicaid and other so-called poverty programs, of course.

As did many young girls in my generation, I loved horses. I saved my baby sitting money to go riding at a local stable, and spent a great amount of time reading and dreaming about having a horse. Then, one day when I was 12, the dream seemed to come true.

A girl I rode with often offered to give me an old mare, and I was delighted to lead her home.  All I had was a soft rope around her neck, but that was plenty for such a gentle creature. I tied her to the tree in front of the house, brought her carrots from the kitchen, brushed her with my old hair brush and dreamed of long rides and showing off to my friends.

Then Mother came home. She admired “Ginger” very much, petting her soft nose and laughing at her attempts to get more petting. And then began a new phase of my ethical and economic education.

“What will you feed her?” she asked. “How much does it cost, and where do we get it? Oh, and where would we store it? Where will we keep her?”  ”

I thought about the big barn and large stack of hay bales at my friend’s house, then looked around at our small yard, quite naked of any outbuildings. I didn’t want to think of how many things we’d had to do without, simply because we didn’t have the money.

I couldn’t think of any answers to her very reasonable questions, but was not yet willing to give up the dream.

And then, the horse lifted her tail and did what horses do… and mother sighed, asking me how I was going to explain to the landlord the piles of horse manure that were sure to collect. “What will you do with it, Susan?” she asked, reasonably and calmly.

Just then the telephone rang, and when she came back out she told me that my friend’s father was coming to collect the horse because his daughter had not had any authority to give it away. My dream was shattered, but in light of the obvious economic and practical barriers to keeping her, I was actually relieved as well.

I had “wanted” a horse, and convinced myself that I had a great need for one, but had no idea whatsoever what it would take to get and keep one.

Now just suppose that my mother had been a different person altogether, and she had conspired with me to do whatever it took to force other people to pay for the feed, shelter the horse on their private property against their will, and left it for others to deal with the manure, all without any regard to their own needs and wants.

If you think about it, that’s exactly what happens when the “needs” and even the “wants” of some people are provided for by stealing from other people. We can’t morally or rationally give away things that don’t belong to us either.

None of that could be done without force of arms, of course, something not even available to my individual family, but which would soon be implemented on a national scale via “voting,” and political gamesmanship. The people were told they could live on stolen goods, and they had nobody to ask them those difficult questions. Instead,  the politicians assured them that they didn’t need to think about it, so the “war on poverty” came to despoil and impoverish us all.

Nearly twenty years later, when I had earned enough, had a place of my own, and knew that I could take care of it, I bought a horse. An altogether satisfying experience, and one well worth waiting and working for.