Answering Mitt Romney's Garbage Man

I saw a report today on an anti-Romney commercial featuring a garbage collector who works in Romney’s neighborhood in La Jolla California.  I didn’t see the whole ad and can’t remember the fellow’s name but apparently he was angry with Romney for not being sufficiently sympathetic to him because he has a physically hard job and he’ll be worn out by the time he’s 55 years old.  Like all liberal claims the charge contains a subtle strawman argument – the assumption that Romney doesn’t sympathize with people who work in low-level jobs.  But the reason I bring it up is because it should be an opening to a sorely needed discussion about personal choices and consequences, although it won’t be.

Elections, Barack Obama tells us, have consequences.  Well guess what?  The choices we make in our lives have consequences too, or at least they should.  A 55-year old man who’s working on a garbage truck is, in all likelihood, doing so because he made a series of decisions in life.  Maybe he never graduated from high school.  Maybe he decided higher education was too expensive and too time-consuming.  Maybe he never pursued any other training or educational opportunities that might have given him the skills to advance to a higher level position.  Maybe he was busy raising a family and didn’t have time – that’s a choice too. 

No one in this country is slated to be a garbage collector or anything else in life, that’s the beauty of a free country.  I’ve known many people who started with nothing and overcame hardships to attain success in their lives and their careers.  I’ve also known people who traded higher incomes for other things they valued, such as the opportunity to do something they love, to live where they preferred, to accommodate a spouse or for any number of reasons.  Those are all valid choices in life but they often come at a cost.  The question is this:  who should pay for the cost of your choices?  Do the people who invested the time and money to go to college and earn a higher income owe something to those who chose to spend their time and money differently? 

The natural consequences of our choices in life are nature’s way of steering us towards better choices, thereby fostering a more thriving society.  Ordinarily the job of garbage man should attract young, uneducated men who do it for awhile to make ends meet but who eventually are motivated to take the steps to find better jobs because it is hard, tedious, filthy work.  Unions and government intervention (read leftist intervention) have thwarted nature’s divine plan by creating artificial rewards that wouldn’t otherwise exist; thus we have 55-year old men doing jobs that were intended for younger, unskilled men, and then complaining to Mitt Romney because it’s a hard job for a 55-year old man. 

It is a great thing when the wealthy in a society are willing to share the fruits of their success with those less fortunate; yet it is also incumbent upon society to not artificially insulate people from their choices in life such that personal choices become irrelevant and all of society has to bear the price.  That’s a recipe for a failed society.