Bad Vote

Brrrrr... I just got out of a cold shower. It wasn't voluntary - the damn boiler just can't handle Estonian winter and keeps running out of hot water. But now I'm ready to talk about politics, especially with the government election right around the corner. Electronic voting will begin tomorrow at 9:00 AM so I might as well make up my mind about whom to vote for.

Lets be honest; the choices suck. I keep hearing that there's no one to vote for and I agree with that opinion. Still I feel I need to give my vote to someone to be justified to bitch about government's bad judgement calls in the following 4 years. For a while I've been a supporter of Reform Party which is a centre-right, free market liberal party in Estonia (as Wikipedia phrases it). I'm all for liberalism and I love the idea of free market. They lowered taxes and made Estonia very lucrative for foreign investors. I think it's thanks to them that Estonia is currently in a much better situation compared to Latvia and Lithuania. Our economy looks nice, there have been wonderful advances towards electronically advanced country where we no longer have to fill in paper forms to be piled in some dusty basement, but in stead, everything is made available electronically and information travels faster and much more reliably. I think it's just so cool that Internet access is a basic human right in Estonia.

I kept voting for Reform Party because they are mainly concerned with advancing economy and money is the root of everything. They feel strongly about reducing costs in stead of taking loans. They even pulled Estonia through the global economic crisis without huge debts. I do love them in many ways, but - and this is an important BUT - I don't think I'm politically on the right side anymore!

Having a kid has changed my world views more than I ever imagined, although the change has been so subtle that I didn't realize it for a long time. A couple of years ago I was nearly a right-extremist if such a thing exists. I felt strongly about every man for himself. Some make it some don't. Some people didn't deserve to make it. I kept seeing people who failed at life and I saw many places where they had taken the wrong turn. No one pushed them toward it - they chose to not pay attention in school or to skip classes or take jobs with no perspective when they could have settled for temporary worse pay and a better future. I saw that homeless people were always drunk on cologne or cheap booze - no one poured it down their throats - and I saw how people ended up in dept because of loans they never could afford in the first place - loans they should have declined. All those people had made their choices and failed. I felt very strongly: Why should I care if they have no motivation to strive for a better live? I myself managed on student's loan (little over $1000 back then) for nearly an entire year (I didn't have to pay rent) and I felt proud that I can handle anything life throws at me. I didn't have any pity for people getting minimum wage (more than I had) and kept whining about government not giving them free money.

The change was subtle. When Siiri was very small I sometimes thought about mothers in third world countries and the high mortality rate of babies there. I thought about the poor little babies suffering from illnesses that are routinely cured here. Someone really should try to help them. How about all those 3-year olds crying because they are just so hungry and their parents don't have any food. It's very painful to even imagine it. Okay, that's where my level of empathy stayed for a while. I realized that other people's minds have been tormented by world hunger as long as people have known about it and this hasn't solved the problem. It doesn't help if I also think about it because it's not a problem that I could ever solve.

A while later I realized there are people in Estonia who are suffering from hunger as well. Although all children are entitled to free health care (Yay!), there is no law about making sure their parents can afford food. Lately many people have lost their jobs and food prices have gone up. Now all over the Internet, forums and news comments are describing the everyday lives of common Estonians. They barely have enough money to buy food but the rent is overdue and bills are piling up. They don't see Estonia being a wealthy country by any standards. Of course they've never lived in Indian slums. People are miserable and there's an increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor. Politicians have been focusing on economy so long that they have completely forgot that there are people here, too.

In 1991 Estonia started from the soviet union mindset, where people believed that the government has to provide people with job, apartment and everything they might need. From that time on, Estonia has been on a path towards free market and individual responsibility for one's own fate. Much like the American Dream - you either make it or you don't. Taxes are dropping and the prices of necessary things are going up. Already dental care is so expensive that cavity-free teeth are a luxury that most people simply can't afford. Waiting lists to see specialist doctors are extreme - with some problems you either wait for a year for the doctor to see you or you pay for a private visit. Essentially, even health care has been made into a luxury most people can't afford. This approach isn't working in the USA and I don't want Estonian health care to become anything like that. By the way, I'm very happy for USA for the discussion of the so-called ObamaCare health care reform.

So basically I think it's up to the country to make sure that free good quality health care should be provided to all working citizens or children. Poor people often end up doing the nastiest jobs that simply need to be done and the entire society should be responsible for patching up their various job-related illnesses. And when the poor lose their jobs and they have children then we can't tolerate letting the children starve. That's why we have a society, to make the most of our common potential. There is no greater potential than our next generation. I've heard that society is judged by how the weakest members are treated and I do agree that there is a line that should never be crossed - in a proper civilized country, all people should have the basic necessities. The luxuries are what we all should strive for.

I'm not so hard-core leftist that I would collect all money from all people and divide it equally. However, I do think that there should be no homeless people and no one should be left to starve or cool to death. I don't think poor people should have nice lives, Utopia doesn't exist. Poor people deserve to have crappier lives for the wrong choices they've made in life, but there is still an invisible line. If we let our societies weakest to live below certain standards then our own humanity and compassion suffers and we are worse people simply for letting people starve and not doing anything about it. Perhaps the solution would be to build more soup kitchens or better options for poor people to get free food for food stamps - perhaps only basic food items (flour, milk, bread, etc) so they still have motivation to improve their lives. For homeless people I'd even provide basic beds in some over-crowded old building, with toilets and showers. It doesn't have to look nice, I'd even say it shouldn't look very nice, it just has to serve a basic function. Or I don't know. It just feels wrong that there are homeless people in the -20 C weather that we've been having for a while now. It feels wrong that some people don't wash themselves for months because they have nowhere to wash themselves. It seems barbaric.

Another issue I never used to think about is kindergarten availability. By law, all children are entitled to get accepted in kindergarten before they go to school. Unfortunately, the waiting lists are so long that some kids don't get accepted until they're 5 or 6 years old! Officials say, "well, that is before school." But what is the mother supposed to do? Not everyone can afford personal babysitters and some women have no choice but to postpone going to work. No point in spending time away from your child when all your wages go to the nanny. The mother might as well babysit her own kid. Or should the father stay at home? For equal rights, definitely, but that's usually not the way it goes. The mother sits at home, doesn't contribute as a working citizen, doesn't get any income, can't afford to spend money. Maybe she'll even apply for subsistence allowance to stay alive and she'll become a burden to the society, while she would be happy to go to work, if only she could put her kid in a kindergarten. It's such a stupid problem. It's not cheap to fix but it's well worth whatever costs. The current situation encourages poverty in families with small children, it encourages some people to be forced out of job market for so long that they won't be able to get back and it encourages inequality between sexes.

This kindergarten problem has been a heavy burden ever since I realized that by the time Siiri finally gets into kindergarten, I'll be at home with a little baby. So if I put Siiri in a kindergarten, I take away some poor woman's chance to finally go back to work. It will be so selfish of me not to give Siiri's place to another family whose dinners might depend on it. Yet I feel it's not something I should feel responsible for. I have also waited for years to finally introduce Siiri to children her age. Kindergarten will be so important for her social development. It simply feels wrong to tell Siiri, at the age of four, that she has no friends because some other lady might be more desperate to put her child in kindergarten. No, I can't punish Siiri for the government's mistakes. I shall punish the government - I will not vote for Reform Party.

During their time in charge they have done very little for the people. Their most important accomplishment in this area is mother's wages. After childbirth, a woman gets paid her normal wages for 18 months. This enables working women to have children and it encourages birth, especially among people with high income, as the maximum monthly wage is over $2500. This means that only stupid people with no monetary thinking have children before they're well-established in their careers and near age 40. I'm one of the poor suckers who got the minimum mother's wage last time and I'll get the minimum this time as well. No one wants healthy young people to have healthy babies. Obviously they want middle-aged women having fertility treatment to be able to have even one baby. Mother's wages with such a high maximum has a positive effect on birth rates for a while but in the end it encourages wrong kind of family planning.

So all-in-all I will give my vote to... dun-dun-dunn... Social democratic Party. I can just hear how some people just hit their foreheads against their desk, so I'll explain. Yeah, they're socialist and they want to increase taxes to increase benefits to all. But they are promising to provide kindergarten places to everyone, plus they support free school lunch to all (now it's only for some age groups I think), they are concerned with life standards in the countryside, which has been too badly ignored. They want to increase child support three-fold to €60. I think all those are worthy goals and they make up for the progressive tax they are proposing. In their view, salary over €1000 per month should be taxed with 26% in stead of 20%. If that 6% from some people helps provide all children free lunch, then I think it's worth it. They had a whole set of very expensive and very lucrative election promises and all those are impossible to turn into a reality any time soon. However, I believe most of their goals are a step closer to what Estonian people need. I really hope they don't get majority of votes because they are too socialist, but I do want to see them breathing down Reform Party's neck to remind them that country doesn't consist of only economy - there's people too.

Okay, now I'm all warmed up after the cold shower and I feel much better now that I have decided who to vote for.