Enough with the auto worker sob-stories already!

Stories like these make me nuts: This is not the American Dream, this is the Auto Industry Nightmare. It is yet another tale of an older person being laid off from their auto manufacturing job and not having any marketable skills that will allow them to maintain their standard of living.

And what? WHAT? What am I supposed to do about it? I definitely feel badly for someone who made a bet like that and lost (that is, this worker made a bet that he did not have to educate himself or have a plan B in case he could not keep a job in which he was no doubt overpaid). It must be incredibly frightening to be over 50, in poor health, uneducated and out of work. But what am I supposed to do about it?

It would be one thing if someone like him came directly to me for charity, and admitted he was making an appeal for charity. Or if someone like Jill Miller Zimon, The Moderate Voice blogger posting the story, openly solicited donations on this unemployed gentleman's behalf.

But nooooooo. After Miss Zimon tugs at our heartstrings, she ends her column with an appeal to a government fix-it:

Now what? Barack Obama? John McCain? Gov. Granholm? Anybody?

Any appeal to a government solution is an appeal for tax dollars, no-one would bother to deny this. Any appeal for tax dollars is an appeal to take money from people by force that they would not willingly part with -- or at least, not part with in the amount sought -- else, why resort to the government instead of direct appeals for cash?

So here's my question for Miss Zimon, the same question any statist needs to be asked and of course never has a good answer for: why am I responsible for for Mr. Laid-Off-Autoworker's plight? Did I make him take that job? Did I make him stay in it? Did I make him not have a Plan B in case his meal ticket vanished? Did I make his employer lay him off? Did my actions cause him to have arthritis?

And a question for every laid-off unionized auto worker: did you have any sympathy for the thousands who remained unemployed when you used the power of government guns to prevent them from joining your union or prevent them for underbidding you for your job?