I have family in Wheeling, West (by God) Virginia. I was over there last summer and for some reason the idea of retiring there has popped into my mind. So I spent some time poking around on the internet. My gosh the real estate is cheap.
This is turn led me to the local paper, The Intelligencer. My goodness, I had no idea there was so much serious opposition to health care. This is in West Virginia, where acres of poor people do not have insurance! Where Medicare and food stamps are pillars of life!
No surprise. When you don’t have all that much to start with, you look at any big change as something that has the potential to leave you worse off than before.
Why is it so hard to understand that conservatives actually do believe in self-support. This includes programs that would be to one’s own benefit. Every time I hear arguments like “How can they be against it? It’ll help them!”, I get the idea that liberals are all selfish and willing to do anything to help themselves, regardless of the cost to others.
The Intelligencer, et al, is owned by Ogden Publishing. Founded by Ogden Nutting and now run by President Bob Nutting they are, across their 30-odd newspapers (they own magazines, phone books, Seven Springs Ski Resort, and a bunch of the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Pittsburgh Penguins) VERY conservative. Most of their papers share this bent and occasionally they’ll make sure that each paper will run the same editorial on some national issue on the same day.
It will be, easily, less a matter of ‘West Virginians are against health care reform’ than ‘Bob Nutting’ (from whom I’ve tried to buy a paper) is against health care reform.
I grew up in Wheeling, WV. If you have any questions about the town go ahead and ask.
Real estate is cheap there because the economy sucks. It’s not a bad place to retire (just because everything is so cheap) but it’s a horrible place if you are young and want to find a job. They didn’t do so bad in the recent downturn because the poor economy there meant that their real estate prices never went ridiculously upward before the bubble burst. The end result is that the economy there has been surprisingly stable when the rest of the country has gone into the dumper. Still, businesses are drying up and going away. It was a town of 40,000 people when I left 20 years ago. Now it’s down to about 30,000, and continues to shrink. To turn the economy around, the city council keeps doing study after study to figure out what to do, but never actually does anything. Then they all sit around and try to figure out why nothing ever gets done about the economy. Someone seriously needs to slap these folks upside the back of their heads.
Anyway, culturally, Wheeling is a funny little town. Pittsburgh is close by and there is easy access from the Interstates, so Wheeling has ended up being influenced a lot by the Pittsburgh culture. There’s a lot of yinzers in Wheeling. There used to be a lot of old school steel workers and coal miners, but that’s about gone these days.
People from Wheeling don’t think of West Virginia as being this poor, backwards state. They feel like they are constantly fighting off their bad reputation as a bunch of poor Appalachian hillbillies. If you told someone from wheeling that there are “acres of poor people” in West Virginia they’d probably argue with you. Then in the next sentence they’d complain about how such and such business has closed down and everyone’s out of work. It’s a funny town.
As for the Intelligencer, come on. It’s a little 3 page newspaper. The front page is straight off of the AP wires and the editorial page is whatever a few people who get a bee in their bonnet happen to write in about. I wouldn’t take it as an accurate cross section of West Virginia life. There are some folks who take it seriously, but a lot of folks read it just because it’s the only paper in town.
For a counterexample, consider the editorial in the Charleston Gazette:
Until Reagan, West Virginia was solid Democrat through and through, due in large part to organized labor, fond memories of the New Deal, and the Great Society programs. As the shotgun marriage of the GOP with the religious right continues to fall apart, I expect West Virginia to return to more historical voting patterns.
I suppose my surprise is simply because I have been out of the US for a while. Further, although I expect people of the internet to give vent to unedited thoughts, I would have anticipated more deliberative writing from an editorial board. Love or hate health care reform, attacking it for being pro-abortion is a weak reed.
Because there’s nothing virtuous about “self-support” when it (1) is ineffective in light of the fact that they are not insured, and (2) costs society more in lost productivity, duplicative spending, and other waste. Information asymmetry (due to pricing opacity and unorganized consumers bargaining with well-organized providers and insurers) and coordination problems have long been known to give rise to market failures.
Every time I hear arguments about “self-support,” I get the idea that conservatives don’t know the first thing about the functioning of the markets that they claim to cherish.