Bad blast from past

Wes Eades’s June 20 letter reminds me of a column that Vermont Royster (1914-1996), longtime Wall Street Journal columnist, wrote in the mid-1970s during a moribund economy. His thesis was that no society, regardless of its wealth, could afford to subsidize everything.

Sooner or later, such subsidization will result in a stagnating economy such as we experienced then. The year 1975 was 10 years into the Great Society, a philosophy developed during a time of high productivity and low inflation. The idea was every enterprise of human experience required the funding and staffing of a government agency to expedite it. The National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and Head Start are three results of this idea.

Medicare, with its huge bureaucracy and complicated requirements, today stands as the greatest monument to this notion.

A recent book by Newsweek and Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson titled The Great Inflation and its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence makes the point that we’re still experiencing fallout from the trauma of this era. Nothing afterward has ever quite been the same again.

Personal wealth, corporate productivity and pensions were all influenced to their detriment by seemingly unstoppable inflation. Let’s not repeat this mistake. 

Eddie Mitchell

Waco

Don’t believe the Democrats

An editor’s note of June 19 states that Democratic leaders said the decision to continue the E-Verify program beyond the next two years will be discussed and possibly made permanent when Congress tackles immigration reform.

Don’t believe Democratic leaders’ spin. This just means any decision to extend E-Verify will come after pandering to illegal immigrants by giving them some kind of legal status through amnesty and rewarding them for the criminal behavior of disrespecting and breaking U.S. borders.

Then, when E-Verify is extended, it will be useless to expel them from these jobs that legal American citizens need and should have in this economy.

Greg Coody

Waco

EDITOR’S NOTE: We just told you what Democratic leaders said. We didn’t say we believed them.

The faith in healing

We congratulate our dad, Edward M. Lee, on his nearly 50-year career in the practice of medicine and the specialty of urology; for his devotion to patients; and for being a principled, humble, gracious, caring, innovative, curious, nuanced, old-fashioned, tie-wearing physician.

We especially congratulate him for pursuing the best science and alleviating suffering. His indefatigable endeavors have met a standard of healing almost artistic. He has shown that to attend, treat and comfort an individual in pain is an act of faith and love, written large.

We’re proud of you, Dad, for the choices you’ve made and the service you have done for your profession.

Loren Lee

Jeff Lee

Amy Lee-Lovelady

EDITOR’S NOTE: Loren and Jeff live in Waco. Amy lives in Vero Beach, Fla.

Nugent meets a fan and a critic

Ted Nugent as drug czar [June 14 column, “We could be winning the war on drugs”]? What a joke!

Aside from displaying the aptitude of a pretentious whiner, Nugent has nothing intelligent or new to offer. My only surprise is that, with his arrogance, he hasn’t nominated himself for a Nobel Prize yet.

Nugent in fact displays the kind of bigotry about drugs that created the very situation the United States finds itself in today.

But rather than reconsider the issue of drugs in terms conducive to developing a comprehensive strategy aimed at intelligently safeguarding youth and the community-at-large — even if that means some form of legalization — he chooses to reiterate yesterday’s nonsense while extolling the virtues of himself.

It can be demonstrated that there is a direct correlation between prohibition, violence and where drug profits go.

This will not change in spite of all the lurid portrayals of American drug-users. What’s more, this correlation is also recognized by Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) www.leap.cc.

All Nugent manages to accomplish is reaffirming to the world that he still misses the point.

Wayne Phillips

Hamilton, Ontario

* * *

I’m sure glad I got a chance to read Ralph Givens’ June 19 letter (“The Nuge vs. drugs.”) I had been wondering why we had so many drug problems in our towns, cities, counties, states and nation. Now I know. It’s becaues they passed laws making it illegal to sell drugs, buy drugs and consume drugs not prescribed by a doctor, according to Mr. Givens.

If that’s true, I guess we need to repeal all those laws and then repeal all laws concerning murder, robbery, rape and whatever else people are doing because there is a law against it. I’m sure we would all be able to live in peace and tranquility.

And it looks like we won’t have to worry about another country attacking us because our president is going to make friends with all leaders of the Axis of Evil and we can live happily ever after.

Gig ’em, Ted.

Jim Gazzaway

Fairfield