R
Ridgerunner
Guest
I used to do social security disability cases, and the amazing thing in so many of them was the evident ability of those who got it.Out of the hundreds of cases I took, I only lost one. I do a lot of workers’ comp defense, and see the same thing. But after awhile, something began to occur to me. It’s not that those people are so terribly disabled. Most of them aren’t. It’s that they’re “somewhat disabled”. Industrial work, certainly, requires a significant amount of athleticism in particular ways. If you lose that, it isn’t as if you can’t work at all, it’s that you can’t keep up production quotas in a machine-driven environment that assumes that athleticism. Virtually any industrial enterprise can accommodate almost any disability nowadays, but they don’t want to do it, and aren’t required to do it if it reduces production. So a lot of those people can’t find work they can actually do on a consistent basis. They stay home, get deconditioned, get illnesses that deconditioning causes, and get more and more disabled with time.
I think a lot of this problem is due to the foreign competition; perhaps also due to illegal labor. Most illegals I know are young men; very athletic. Not all are, but certainly most are. People who are “somewhat disabled” simply cannot stay in the game.
I remember picking strawberries as a child. It was very hard work. I remember an old man who walked with two canes. He was so crippled, he had to scoot along the ground on his rear end to pick, instead of walk and stoop. He was an extraordinarily good picker. But in any event, all pickers worked at their own paces. Some were fast, some weren’t. The pay, of course, was determined by production. But the labor itself was not machine-driven. If you got too hot, you could go rest in the shade of the shed. If your back was killing you, you could stand up for a bit. If you needed a drink of water, you just went and got it. I think there are a lot of these “disabled” people who could definitely work. But for a lot of them, there’s no place where they can do it. I’m not sure “free trade” doesn’t have a very serious downside. It’s not free at all, in many ways.
And too, my grandmother, who was a widow without all that much money, had a woman who came to clean and do various chores. She came every week. When she finished, my grandmother simply paid her in cash, and that was that. The woman was a farm wife who obtained her “personal” income that way. You can’t do that now. You have to verify eligibility, keep a payroll account, keep withholding, file weekly reports and payments, file W-2s at the end of the year. The trouble essentially doubles the wage. How many elderly, or not so elderly people would hire some of those “disabled” people to do a little bit of household work for cash, if they could? I have a feeling there were a lot of “disabled” people working some years ago; people who would all be on SSD today, sitting home getting so fat they get diabetes and heart problems and let Medicare pay for the consequences.
Many ordinary households, at one time, had “a girl” (around here, they were white, so let’s don’t pounce on the term) who was not particularly employable elsewhere, who worked in the home and was accommodated in the home. “The girl” was fully fed, sheltered and clothed and received a small salary in cash, and lived a better life than young unwed mothers now on welfare.
You can’t tell me the government cares a thing about “the poor” or “the disabled” when it makes it impossible for people to hire them.
To me, and I guess I’m retrograde, it’s all part of the same fabric with abortion on demand. Some people (e.g. the unborn, those considered to be in a “persistent vegetative state”) need to be destroyed because they’re inconvenient and will impinge on one’s lifestyle. Some people, on the other hand, need to be packaged up in benefits because they “can’t cut it”, are encouraged to be worthless and sit their lives out on the shelf as permanent wards of the government.