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So much can be said about this issue. I began a life time of campaigning against welfare in 1965 when I resigned from the Balt Dept of Welfare. In my letter of resignation I said, "Welfare promotes far more dependency than it overcomes." I was nieve and young. (Still am nieve, just not young)The purpose of welfare is to enslave.
Government is a rapacious maw that seeks to devour everything. It must be kept in check or it becomes a destroyer of worlds. We are learning that hard lesson today. Our Founders understood it perfectly.
The King had absolute power and ruled his subjects with an iron fist. So did Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao and all the other tin pot dictators who have launched themselves as saviors. They are not. They are demons who destroy.
Then we come to Barack who, by any other name, seeks the absolute destruction of the greatest nation in the history of mankind. His reign of terror proves we are not invincible.
We are not protected by our Constitution or by our institutions. Our only protection is ourselves. We can come together as a band of brothers fighting for the dignity and honor of our independence or we can be herded into cattle cars for a final trip to the camps.
There is no salvation in government. That is the singular message of the Obama presidency. We will learn to throttle government before all is lost or history will remember us as the generation that failed to stand for what its progenitors knew to be true.
That's not quite correct.
The Left believes individuals are generally incapable of change, but that Society is infinitely malleable. And when Society changes, individuals will change as a result.
It's a lot of fun, from their POV, to either make huge changes in society while experimenting with their ideas, or to sit around bitching about how horrible the world is because they aren't getting that opportunity.
Certainly a lot more fun than getting down in the mud and blood of trying to help individual actual people change their lives. Which, to be fair, NOBODY really knows how to do, on any consistent basis.
The liberal welfare mentality destroys what it touches...
I saw a fascinating example of this in the Indian tribes of Arizona.
When Indian casinos were legalized, several different tribes built them. Those around the municipal areas and highways thrived, and those in more rural areas did not, so closed.
But with great charity, the tribes sponsored a state initiative to allow wealth sharing among them. That is, the profits from the successful casinos would be divided per capita among the tribes, so all would benefit.
Yet this is just background. The important thing was what the tribes, large and small, did with their new money. What truly stood out was how much wisdom went into these decisions, far more than you might suspect.
A larger tribe, the Pima tribe, lived for many hundreds of years on very meager amounts of food, so their metabolisms are very efficient, needing only about a third of the minimum calories of someone with European ancestry. But with a typical American diet, they are plagued with morbid obesity and diabetes.
So they spent their money on a state of the art, world class, tribal diabetes clinic.
A wise choice. However, of all the tribes, what I think was the wisest was a small tribe, with only a few hundred members. With their money, they vied for education. Full funding for any tribal member, as far as they wanted to go in school. If they wanted a PhD, their tribe will pay for it.
And just money was not enough. They decided to make education a hallmark of their tribal culture, that every one of them should encourage and support it in any way they could. That all adults were obligated to help children become the most educated they could be.
It truly makes me wonder what will become of that tribe in the next hundred years.
For a long time I have said that we "save" children one at a time through good parenting and hard work. Being a good parent is the hardest job in the world. Being a bad parent is quite easy.
To my mind there is nothing more evil than producing children in order to receive welfare payments. Our government uses our hard earned tax money to seduce young girls into welfare, thereby dooming their offspring. Young women "sell" their offspring for welfare benefits. The current system is itself evil, but the good people who fight against it are demonized by the leftist media.
Welfare attempts to mask the symptoms of poverty and in so doing it makes the root causes stronger. Even worse, we are no longer allowed to discuss the root causes of poverty, decaying schools and feral youth. The Democratic hell holes we call cities are doomed.
I love the way Greenfield blithely deconstructs the foundations of liberalism.