Gary Knox’s column in the July 27th edition of the Yuma Sun was a real hoot. It was a joke, wasn’t it? He certainly couldn’t be serious about describing those of us on the right as mindless robots, mentally lazy ideologues, rabble rousers, full of hostility, not use a shred of evidence to back up his assertions, and then call our rhetoric “mean.”

He is right about one thing, “our political and economic systems are threatened,” but it’s not because we’re speaking out, it’s because we have been silent too long. And I didn’t need Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck to alert me to that. It’s a lifetime of learning. My father spoke out against big brother government in the thirties when FDR sent his henchmen to our farm to slaughter our cattle in order to protect the price of beef. My father quit farming when the government began paying farmers not to farm. He didn’t think it an honorable proposition.

I saw as a teacher what big government did to education. Federal dollars had to be spent before a certain date or the federal funds would be curtailed the next fiscal year. It didn’t matter much what we bought, just spend the money. I observed reading programs which were rated excellent by Title I just because the classroom was surrounded by computers and tens of thousands of dollars worth of computer programs lined the walls. It mattered not that the classroom teacher didn’t know how to use the computers and so taught reading the way we all learned, with the printed word. The Title I programs were rewarded simply because they looked good and the coordinator had spent a lot of money.

Rent control legislation in New York made the cost of housing skyrocket. Section 8 government aid caused the same bubble in Flagstaff. I built a duplex on some property there and rented the units for $250. But when a tenant couldn’t afford the rent I applied for Section 8 and discovered that all of the sudden my little two bedroom unit would rent for $650. When the taxpayers are paying the bill, the sky is the limit.

The biggest reason the cost of higher education has quadrupled, nay risen ten fold, is that Uncle Sam started paying the bills. If we worked and saved all summer we could squeak through a year of school on little more than $800. We had wardrobes of two skirts and five blouses and squeezed our toothpaste tubes until our fingers hurt, but we made it. Now colleges don’t bother to control costs. Raise the cost of tuition and then build monuments that show the world what a great educator you were. Why do college books cost $200 - $400 each? Because Uncle Sam is paying the bill. What caused the cost of health care to spiral out of control? The government began paying the bills.

Reagan said it best. Governments do not solve problems, they create them, but we knew that long ago. The government forced banks to make risky loans. Banks have to make money, so they found a way to profit in spite of government regulations.

Do you really think that the 2000 page health care and finance bills have broken “complex problems into easily understood component elements”? If we do not speak the truth, Mr. Knox, dispute our facts, but don’t call us mindless, lazy ideologues. That’s a lazy man’s style of rhetoric.