The Institutionalized Vice

While sleazy -- to put it nicely -- state legislatures in states like Arizona, Kansas and Missouri, to name a few, go out of their way, as much as they can legally get away with, to put strict limitations on welfare assistance to the poor, equally sleazy private big business and public governmental human resources/personnel offices actually examine the names of job applicants with a figurative, and probably literal in some cases, magnifying glass, trying to figure out what ethnicity/race applicants belong to, or checking to see if "very experienced" actually means "too old."  These are just a couple of unseemly hurdles that job applicants must clear before or if they can successfully land a job other than becoming self-employed or entrepreneurs; and don't even bother complaining to the worthless E.E.O.C., which is one federal agency that should officially be put out of business by Congress. 

Then pompous, self-righteous legislators go around sermonizing and lecturing about "personal responsibility" while at the same time building or enabling these same institutionalized barriers to employment, including enabling policies that sends jobs out of the country, importing foreign workers, abolishing good government services that provide jobs, knee-capping labor unions, and crafting budgets that handicap or prevent needed public works projects, such as repairing or expanding useful infrastructure.  Commoners are being squeezed from both ends of the institutionalized vice, and our only hope for improvement is to vote the elected scofflaws out.

[Originally posted on Commoner on 4/13/15; revised on 4/28/15.]