meanwhile the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poore

I’m having a hard time relating your hunting club story to anything. Are you saying some people should pay their social security by mending fences or selling tickets to social security dinners?

If we are talking about social security, I think that it does pretty well with the idea that everybody contributes to it. Even the lowliest part time worker at McDonalds gets fica taken out of his paycheck, and people who don’t pay anything into it never get to collect it.

Of course nobody gets exactly what they put into it, many people die before they ever collect a penny, but it’s basically an insurance policy. Some people never get sick and never collect on their health insurance policy and that money goes to pay for people who get sick a lot.

I just don’t see what you have against social security, or even if you have anything against it.

And where do you stand on single payer? I know that you hate the way the that insurance companies get such a big cut, and so do I, but I don’t think you would be for a single payer, so what do you expect? As for the democrats not getting it when they had both houses, well they had some blue dogs, and that combined with the republican party voting en masse against it, and waging a strident campaign against it, I think the onus for killing the single payer lays much more heavily on the republicans. And basically the reps were against Obamacare no matter what. They used to like the payer mandate until it became part of Obamacare and then they hated it. They agreed that the current system doesn’t work well, but they never had any plan of their own. So the hell with them.

Is any of this really fair? Is life itself fair? Who knows? It is what it is, and it's all we've got to work with for now.

I think that is what the conservatives were saying during the gilded age when people had sixty hour work weeks and monopolies ruled the economy, but the progressives and the socialists fought that and among other things got the forty hour work week which you enjoyed working at the mill. And things were better for awhile, but now we are back at the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer at an alarming rate, and that seems to be just fine with you.

Going down to Missouri this weekend, so I might be a day or two later getting back to the fray.