Survival of the fittest is GOP ideal

Daniel F. Olivier, Bullhead City, Ariz.

Saturday, April 21, 2012 | 2:02 a.m.

In his April 10 letter to the editor, Craig Hutzler says, “I’m sorry, but if a person cannot afford good housing, medical care and enjoyable pastimes, then that person should just not have them.” That is an ingenious way of expressing Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory. (By the way, the religious Republicans won’t find the Darwinian theory in the Bible — only the opposite.)

I doubt that most Americans want our country to become a Third World-type country with a few fabulously rich people in control and everyone else starving and dying in the streets without health care.

As long as we are promoting our economic theories, let me provide a little sound bite: If some of the people cannot afford a place to live and health care, then none of the people (that includes the rich) should have them. I believe that would pass muster with the Bible, too.

Some Republicans are so determined to prevent freeloading by a few, who are always there, they want to shut off from the necessities of life to everybody else who cannot afford them — the vast majority of the needy — on the theory that these unfortunates are “just not trying hard enough.”

I am sure that if some Republicans had their way, the survival of the fittest rule would even apply to age and old people, who would be left to die in the streets even if they were unable to work.