David McElroy

Most of the people I know aren’t happy. They put on brave faces and try to fit in, but in their hearts, they’re hurting — because their lives aren’t what they wanted them to be. Why do people live this way?

I’m thinking about this because of someone I met earlier this week. Her story reminded me of something from the personal life of Steve Jobs, but I’ll get to that in a moment. This woman is a teacher who lives in a nice suburban house and loves her two beautiful young children. Her attorney husband provides nicely for the family and treats her well. But she’s miserable when she’s honest, as she was with me Monday night.

What she doesn’t tell most people is that she’s in love with another man and she says she always will be. He loved her, too, and wanted to marry her a decade ago, but he lived in England and was going home after working in this country for a year. He was an architect and he had his own practice back home. He begged her to come with him, but she didn’t want to leave what she already had here.

So she said “goodbye” to him for the last time at the airport and they both promised to always love each other. In the meantime, she’s started raising two children with a man who provides well for her, but who can’t give her what she really needs inside. Just a couple of months ago, the English architect married, too. She says the new woman looks a lot like her. She says she hopes they’re happy, but her voice sounds hollow when she says it.

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Most people who want smaller government are still putting their faith in electing politicians to shrink the size of government. Will you give up this fantasy when you find out that half of the population now gets some form of government benefit?

One of the points I keep making is that most people don’t want individual freedom and personal responsibility. They want a Nanny State to take care of things. To make matters worse, as more and more people get a check of some kind from that Nanny State, they’re happy to support coercion. Their only concern is increasing the amount of money they get, not reducing the size of the Nanny State.

According to U.S. Census data, 48.5 percent of Americans lived in households receiving federal “benefits” of some sort or another in the first quarter of 2010. The numbers are going up as the economy gets worse. So how much support do you really think there is for the sorts of cuts that are necessary to keep the U.S. economy (or the world economy) from collapsing?

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I have to admit that I don’t like banks. Their persnickety rules and condescending attitudes have irritated me over the years in more ways than I can list here. So this might be the first time that I’ve ever been forced to defend a bank. Well, sort of, anyway.

You might have heard the news that Bank of America is instituting a $5-per-month charge for customers using its debit card. When I first heard this, I was outraged, because I knew that the banks were compensated by getting a small slice of each transaction the card is used for. What I didn’t realize at first, though, is that Congress just intervened in the market to cut that fee almost in half, taking away a big chunk of revenue for the banks.

Previously, every time you used your debit card, the bank received a fee from the merchant of 44 cents for handling the transaction. But in an amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial law, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) got that fee cut to 24 cents per swipe. In one giant bite, banks had their income from their debit card operations slashed by roughly 45 percent.

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