A Quadriplegic Libertarian Perspective
by: J. Pritchard
I was never told, but shown, that hard work could get you ahead—or keep you where you are comfortably. My father grew up in Pittsburgh; he had an extensive paper route, cut grass, and did odd jobs for neighbors. These small jobs allowed my dad to buy a car on his own before he was sixteen. He was able to work on the car with my grandpa and had a ride at fifteen and a half, to learn with. When he was able to drive on his own he had more jobs to build a strong foundation—some under the table, including transporting dead bodies for a short period.
After high school (and the Navy) he bought the house of a neighbor he had worked for. Being in the Pittsburgh area he was able to get a job in a steel mill. He saved and he saved and he bought a farmhouse and land in Ohio. The steel mill closed, my mom and dad divorced, and he had to sell the farm-house. My dad started working as a tree trimmer clearing power lines, soon moved up in the company, and started his own KP Tree Service. He kept part of the property and we lived in a trailer for a while.
To summarize more of his work ethic: he worked as a truck driver, played the stock market, bought a house in town, bought back all the land he lost in the divorce, and left a considerable amount of money to his three children when he passed—all through blue-collar work and a bad back. The point is, he left a great impression on me.
Less than five months after my father’s death, I broke my neck.
A man pulling out too early from a stop sign left me an incomplete C6 quadriplegic. Up until then, I had worked hard in fast food, a flea market gig, and odd jobs for the little I had. I didn’t know what government assistance was. Passing over my two-and-a-half year, self-transformational recovery, I’ll get to the crux of my thesis: There has to be a better system for disabled people other than bureaucratic, inefficient, government assistance.
Full disclosure: I’m lucky to have had a father who left me, not a fortune, but enough money to cushion the reality of a truly broken, get-back-on-your-feet (so to speak), assistance system. My hope is to communicate how the current system stifles one’s ability to feel worth in the economy, save money, and live by one’s values—especially for those who haven’t discovered the principles of liberty.
I am truly living in a paradox: I am highly disabled, yet I ascribe to libertarian principles. The current paradigm is not set up in a way where one can be highly disabled (even able-bodied) and live in a truly libertarian fashion—apart from already being rich or choosing not to eat and being homeless. People choose to treat the government as a single, omnipotent entity: the government will pay my bills, buy my food, pay for my education. The reality is, the government is just a group—too large from a libertarian perspective—of individuals. Their salary is coercively taken so they can dictate how much more of your capital they can redistribute. One might ask what if their coercively taken salary was left in the market for productive ends? What if their pool of redistributed capital was left in the hands of people like my dad’s?
Just taking away government assistance is not going to benefit the disabled community in the short run, you have to look big picture—libertarian style. If you think a part of the unnecessary government worker’s salary, left in the hands of families and communities, would not be used constructively and charitably you’re probably not going to agree with me. I happen to believe there’s a reason the income tax didn’t always exist. The way the disabled are better off is if you think libertarian across the board.
The minimum wage law impedes the newly injured, pre-higher educated, and mentally disabled person’s ability to find employment. Being realistic, the uneducated mind in combination with the low functioning body is not the most sought after resource; however, it could be for below the minimum wage. To be libertarian you have to believe in the individual and the fact that peaceful cooperation is going to produce better results than coercion and extortion.
I don’t think the severely disabled, who are unable to leave home or a facility would be thrown to the curb in a libertarian system. I believe in the libertarian society, compassion would still exist, charities would still exist, and citizens would have their previously stolen capital to back up their compassion. There would be accountability, no more “the government takes care of it,” and more “I want to be sure that my donated capital is actually helping disabled people.”
If the individual government representative knows the disabled citizens need help, are you saying the free community and family members don’t know this? It’s insulting to suggest that the free-thinker has no compassion. It is nonsensical to say—that if given the chance to keep their forcibly taken capital—people would continue to fund policing the world, the “War on Drugs”, the militarization of police, the salary of nonessential government employees, 865 US military bases worldwide, the continuous “War on Terror,” foreign aid, the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the NSA creeps, (the list is endless), and not fund family, friends, and complete strangers who are disabled and need real help.
The current system takes the disabled person and says “I’ll take care of you”—the best system would empower the individual to help themselves. Compassion is not created out of a vacuum by a coercive state, it is spread by free people and the free market.
