Socialism is problem, not solution
A recent letter writer supports socialist Bernie Sanders, and that's his right. He likes socialism and says most Americans don't understand it. I understand it and don't like it. Sanders is a nice guy, but he's dreaming when he thinks our government should provide everything to everybody for free. Nothing is free, somebody has to pay for it, and there aren't enough rich folks to pick up the tab. Socialism didn't make this country great. The letter writer won't like this, but capitalism and individual freedom made us great. Remove a citizen's incentive to "get ahead" and redistribute his wealth to others, and you will destroy America. The letter said capitalism "in the extreme defines dictatorship" but overlooked the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba, which are all socialist and are dictatorships. Karl Marx was a socialist, though he called his system Communism and said the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was necessary to make everything perfect. Communism is socialism in its purest form, and when I worked for your FBI, we investigated Communists because they were considered evil and thought to pose a threat to our freedom. Were we wrong? I don't think so.
America already has too many socialist programs, and none of them work well, so we don't need any more. Liberals/progressives think that if they just spend more of our tax money, they can eliminate poverty and reach that special utopia. Money never buys happiness, whether you earn it for yourself, or the government gives it to you. I'm a conservative and hopefully will have a chance to vote for a conservative candidate for president.
Carl "Bud" Paepcke
Fortson
Say no to Sabal
I really enjoyed the opinion piece you ran last week about the Sabal Trail pipeline. I think it's important to remember that any time an oil or gas pipeline project is on the table, it often means clean water is at risk, but that's just the beginning.
Continuing to put infrastructure in place for energy sources like these only furthers our community's dependence on dirty energy at a time when we desperately need to transition to renewables. The more we can reroute and ultimately block pipeline projects like these, the more quickly we can shift to clean energy sources that don't put our drinking water at risk.
Gov. Nathan Deal should publicly reject this pipeline as he did the Palmetto Pipeline, and I urge all of Georgia's legislators to recognize that with today's climate crisis, a pipeline like this is a dead end.
Flannery Keck
Atlanta
Seeking the high ground
Our nation has established beautifully moral principles of freedom, the God-ordained right as individuals to choose. We each will die alone with the choices we make. No club, church, political party, school, government, or even a family can make that choice for us.
With each American generation we must individually accept the responsibly to keep lit two candles, 1) our freedom of choice candle and 2) the truth candle that enables us to make the informed choices. Keeping both of these candles lit is the hard part of living in a free society and dealing with those minute to minute choices we must make. Yet each must decide. It is cheating ourselves if we copy the answers from the guy next to us. The guy at the beginning of the row may be wrong.
My point is that individual drifting away from morality happens. Too often and too easily we hit the clicker to avoid the questions. Our tough training in the discipline of being an American was to be taught a formula. Then by experience we eventually pick up on the trick, which boils down to living The Golden Rule, simply asking the question "How would I feel?" For many of us followers of example it has been to ask the question "What would Jesus do?" Regardless, if we do not develop the habit of automatically dealing with the questions then morality abandons us and life goes haywire. Call it Hell.
The daily chore list for America is to seek out and act upon truth, to conscientiously find the hard and high ground. Soon the right answers become second nature and problems are solved before they even start. Believe in it that come Monday we can have a nation and world full of lit candles.
Jack Tidwell
Columbus
Too much for too little
I can control how much water I use. I can control how much electricity I use. Now let's talk about cable TV. There is no control there.
I have a friend who is 78 years old. She gets $600 a month, but she has a little job sitting with an elderly lady on Saturday and Sunday. My friend told me she pays $80 a month for cable TV. She told me when her job runs out she'll have to let her cable go. When I go to pay my bill every month, I see all of these young people paying $200, $300 a month. These same young people are going to be retired one day and living on a limited income.
Not only are we paying high prices, but ever since we went to digital we don't have good quality TV anymore. You turn the TV on, you go to a cable station and then you get this message saying "one moment please this station should be available shortly." I think they should have perfected it better.
Sandra Waugh
Columbus
This story was originally published November 9, 2015 at 4:18 PM with the headline "Socialism is problem, not solution ."