Due to a particularly acute bout of sloth yesterday, I woke up this morning to a pile of embers in the wood burner and an empty wood box. This sent me outside to snag an arm load of snowy billets from the pile, and that for some reason got me thinking about a recent chat with a friend -- a railroad buff -- who now works in the small city where I spent my boyhood.
Me: "When I was a little kid we could see poor Fort Dodgers carrying gunny sacks down on the tracks east of the Illinois Central depot to gather coal-car spillage. The railroad dicks left them alone."
Him: "I've heard about that. Now they'd just run down to the welfare office."
Yes, many of them would.
Then I wondered what we could say about the obvious statist objection that some people would, by superior strength or diligence or intelligence, get more coal than others. Who would regulate the coal recovery workers in the named of fairness and equality?
The best answer I could conceive at this early hour is the coal pickers themselves, resulting in some ramshackle homes being warmer than others.
It isn't quite as cruel as it sounds. The very old and the incapacitated always seemed to get heating fuel. Might have been friends, churches, Boy Scouts, Oddfellows -- all sorts of compassionate people feeling compelled to recognize the commonality of interests in helping one another, even before we sold our souls to the redistributionists.
Only those who suffered too many bouts of acute sloth were frozen out, rendering to Darwin his just due.
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You don't have to use this small personal recollection to arrive at any grand macro conclusions about the way we do things in these latter years. But if you want to, it's okay by me.
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