Government took care of me

Syndicated columnist

Taxation is theft, no?

Government causes more problems than it solves, right?

You pay taxes, and you don't get anything for your money.

And those are three good reasons to storm the Capitol and then spend 22 years taking showers with a Proud Boy?

Not really.

A little story, then.

I worked for newspapers most of my life. A few decades ago, I worked for a newspaper that offered a pension.

The chain that owned the newspaper went down in a tangle of bad decisions, debt and breathlessly stupid management. The chain went bankrupt. The paper was sold, and a pension was no longer offered by the new owners.

But, far away, somewhere north of Richmond, a government agency called the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation took control of the bankrupt chain's pension fund, and now they pay my pension, the pension I earned.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation was established in 1974, when I was a high school kid with a night job as a janitor. I didn't know I would become a reporter. I didn't know I'd become a syndicated columnist. I didn't know I'd work for a newspaper chain that went bankrupt. I knew how to sweep floors, and I thought I knew how to talk to girls.

It's not a big pension, but it's mine, and I can leave half of it to my wife, which will help me feel like much less of a failure when I come to die.

Since it won't be a major source of income for us, I use the silly little pension to buy silly little things like beer and cigars and Christmas presents for my wife.

Guys like me, we don't leave much behind. When my father died, he left a four-year-old Buick, $10,000 in life insurance, a pinky ring with his initials on it, a rosary, a two-bedroom apartment full of furniture and a pension my mother collected for the next 32 years.

Not everything government does is good, not at all. Government wastes money sometimes, and they meddle where they shouldn't, but it's wrong to think that everything government does is either bad, intrusive or aimed at forcing you to give up your guns.

Guys like me, we can win bar fights when we're young, and work double shifts and take all the overtime we can get. Women can do all those things, too. But no one is invincible, and you get old, and as much as we love capitalism, we don't have much chance against big corporations. It's sad as hell is what it is.

And one day, at an age when your back hurts in the morning, it'll be nice to see that direct deposit every month, because you're too old to get another job, and anyway, you're tired.

I get a pension not because I went to college, not because I learned a skill and not because I worked hard, although I did do all those things, even if none of them made any difference when the chain tanked. I get a pension because the government, my government, stepped in and made sure I got what is mine.

I'm not grateful. I don't have to be grateful. It's government's job to look after my interests, to offer a little bit of a shield between me and fate, between me and capitalism. I'm small, and capitalism is big. Capitalism is everything, and it can crush me just by rolling over in its sleep.

You wouldn't think you'd have to tell grown people that government does some good things and some bad things. You'd think people could shake that out for themselves, but a lot of them can't. That's why I told this story, because stories teach better than lectures.

And if you see me in the cigar store, well, you'll know the government is really the only reason I'm buying a couple of those good ones from Nicaragua.

© Creators, 2023