This is a response to Travis Hornsby's column from Monday called "Why I am no longer liberal-minded." I would much rather spend my post-work hours doing something relaxing rather than writing a guest column, but I must do something about the rage headache your column has caused me.
I realize there's little I can do about the dehumanizing nature of the study of economics, but I cannot allow you to continue to spread delusional conclusions about an economic system we've been watching crumble before our very eyes for the past two years.
First, I'd like to state that we have a couple of things in common. I am also an ex-Obama campaigner and a non-liberal. I also write and work actively against some of the Obama administration's policies but for reasons much different than your own. The bailout package awarded to financial institutions that contributed to the economic crisis, for example, was an absolute disaster. Ironically the bailout was government welfare (at a much higher level than social welfare programs could ever hope to attain) for institutions that practice the economic ideology you so proudly uphold.
You may not be wealthy, as a previous guest columnist suggested, but you are certainly of privilege. From a global perspective, being a white male born on American soil could very well be the most privileged combination of qualities a person can have.
As an Ecuadorian-born female with brown skin tone, I'd like to share with you some things your economic courses may not have allowed you to understand - we, the poor, don't sit around waiting for our next government check. We work the hardest and longest out of the entire labor force while receiving the least economic reward. So please discontinue suggesting that poor people are simply not "fighting to rise up against their condition" because of incentives by the big, evil government.
Although you try to paint yourself as average, your assertion that millionaires are no different from you "except for a few zeros in their bank account" already sets you apart from the majority of the population. If that assertion is correct, I'm forced to assume you do not know what it's like to live without health insurance or to watch your parents' home be foreclosed. This is not the experience of millionaires, but it is certainly the current reality of millions of Americans around the country.
If you decide to expand your horizons, I would strongly recommend you take a course on labor history so you could shed, or at least open, the tired notion of unions as "monopolies" or threats to economic growth.
I would also recommend you educate yourself on the issues of wealth mobility and inheritance wealth and how these two factors impact the ability of minority populations to break away and "rise up" from centuries of inequality, disenfranchisement and racism. In fact, please educate yourself about minority issues in general to understand how we fit in the economic grid.
Most importantly, do not give up the social (human) perspective when you continue pursuing your economics major. I certainly hope you never arrive at a point in which you view human beings as nothing more than numbers on a chart. If I'm not mistaken, that is the same mentality that has inspired thousands to descend upon Wall Street to demand economic justice.
Diana Moreno is an alumna of UF.
