Posted on 05/23/2014 11:00:49 AM PDT by Kaslin
A birthday is often a time to celebrate, but just as often a time to reflect. What’s been accomplished so far? What’s left to do?
So let’s take a moment to reflect on the legacy of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” as it turns 50. In May of 1964, LBJ had been president for just six months. He’d been sworn in after the tragic murder of John Kennedy the previous November. But Johnson was a man in a hurry to implement big changes. He traveled to the University of Michigan to challenge the graduates.
In his 1964 speech, LBJ celebrated the American ingenuity and industry that has created “plenty for all our people.” But it was now time, he insisted, to “use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life.”
“Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?” he asked them. “Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?”
“Will you join in the battle to give every citizen an escape from the crushing weight of poverty?” The goal was to lift people up. But the end result was lots of federal spending, and no real progress toward the self-sufficiency he ostensibly sought.
Fifty years later, the U.S. has spent some $20 trillion on various welfare programs. Total government welfare spending is 16 times greater today than it was then. Yet, strikingly, the official poverty rate today is the same as it was five decades ago. While the Great Society’s material aid may have raised living standards, it did not lead to greater flourishing. . Rather than helping Americans escape poverty, it has led to long-term dependence. In fact, LBJ’s programs helped break down families and reduce male participation in the labor force.
As a result, “a large segment of the population is now less capable of self-sufficiency than when the war on poverty began,” as poverty analyst Robert Rector wrote this year.
LBJ insisted that: “The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.” Looking back now, it’s clear that by its own measures the “wisdom” of the Great Society was unwise, and the program, in sum, is a massive failure, except as a redistribution scheme.
Exactly 50 years later, it’s obvious the country needs a different approach.
It was a huge success.
“I’ll have those n*****s voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”
-—Lyndon B. Johnson to two governors on Air Force One
About $10 trillion of that went to Fedzilla itself. Charities that enforce donations with submachine guns have the highest overhead rates for some reason.
LBJ - a terrible president and a horrible man. The self-styled “tough guy” (hey, I can pick a beagle up by his ears, “those are ALL my helicopters, son”) who quietly scurried home in 1968 with his tail tucked between his legs when things turned sour.
Nothing changed in 50 years. What a waste of 50 trillion dollars.
LBJ didn’t want to teach more people how to fish. He wanted to addict them to fish handouts.
I wish it was nothing changed. Rather, it changed for the worse. What Jim Crow couldn’t do to black dignity, bribery did.
It’s to cry to see what liberals (and the devil, working through them) did to the USA.
Will we cry, to God?
LBJ said that he was going to create a permanent Democratic slice of the population.
He did.
Once again, a Southern Democrat, creating a larger plantation.
It’s going to last until modern emancipationists get serious.
HiTeck Redneck wrote:
“It’s going to last until modern emancipationists get serious.”
Get serious about what?
There are NO living slaves left.
Anybody that says they are, are of the next generation, and do not matter, nor worthy fo any monies, period.
You completely miss the mark and have no vision of God.
Waging war on poverty can never work. It will always be counterproductive. All that it can do is destroy wealth and increase the experience of poverty. Why? Because you cannot destroy or diminish the negative. You cannot destroy what isn’t. Poverty is the isn’t of something or other. It is not having. Not having enough, not having as much as, not having something or other. It is the negation or negative of wealth and value.
Attacking what doesn’t exist can only destroy value that does exist. Think man who imagines little green men and pursues them with a gun. His bullets will not be stopped by the nonexistent creatures but by real things and perhaps people. Going after the nonexistent, the negative, negation is at best wasteful and often destructive. It is dangerous. And we generally recognize people who are out to destroy the nonexistent that their mind perceives to be a danger.
It is widely recognized that focusing on the negative will result in failure, stagnation and decline. But somehow it is the default operating system on the macro or political level. Our only hope to avoid more struggle, hardship and eventual collapse is to reject this loser’s outlook and embrace the winner’s positive and appreciative consciousness of what is. If we manage to do that we can expect limitless prosperity, progress and growth.
We could have colonized the entire solar system for that amount.
The thing everyone should have understood in 1964, and certainly should understand now, is that ”liberals” use the word “society” when they mean nothing other than government.With his “Great Society” rhetoric Johnson was promising to make a great government. Since government at its best is a necessary evil, that should have been seen for the absurdity it always was. Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1776)
Of the Origin and Design of Government in General, with Concise Remarks on the English Constitution SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one: for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT, which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest . . .
HIteck Redneck wrote:
“You completely miss the mark and have no vision of God.”
This was in response to my asking about “modern emancipationalists”.
The Emancipation Proclaimation was written, and placed in effect by the federal government, 149 years ago. It is by both science, and by the Mosaic Ta’Anach, that defines that a man has 70 years, 80, if he loved by god. Ergo, 149 minus 80, brings us to 69 years removed from the last vestige of any living human being, that could claim the title of ‘slave’, in the continental U.S., as so defined by said Proclaimation.
I believe all this clap-trap about ‘reparations’, is being claimed by the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations, AFTER said Proclaimation, which in turn is nothing more than freed citizens, which those under the Proclaimation have been defined as, attempting to bankrupt a system and means of life, that no longer exists, thereby saddling the rest of the nation, with the obligation ‘to pay up and shut up, for what yo’ cousins, uncles, and parents did’, (whom by the way are also 69 years past dead).
HiTeck Redneck then proceeds to inform that I have no vision of god. To denounce someone for ‘not having a vision of god’, one must have a more direct link to the Divine, themselves, first, should they not? To denounce someone for ‘not having a vision of god’, one might have to have the annointing of the prophets of old.
If having no vision of god, means saying a flat ‘NO’, to those pursuing the reparations circuit, then so be it.
You prove it by mocking God with a lowercase g. QED... what else to say?
Now when you see your need to repent, you will see that all humanity is in the trap of having rebelled against God. That old “bugaboo” called original sin is, in fact, true.
If it hadn’t, we’d not only be living in a paradise, but we would live paradise out in our hearts.
Look at yourself, your scorn, your special pleading, in a mirror. I am referring to larger concepts and it is totally going over your head because you are lost in sin.
Spiritual poverty has to be fought before material poverty will (as appropriate) yield.
This poverty has afflicted not just liberals but much of “conservative” America, which has scornfully treated the Lord.
Ever follow a Facebook discussion that is headed “I Did Not Vote For Obama?” You’d expect to see strong calls for godliness there... WRONG. Supposed conservatives are voicing things, right in front of millions of fellow Americans and who knows what else, that are only one step removed from the cave man. Folks, both the starboard and the port side of the ship to hell will arrive there.
The salt was allowed to get unsalty and what is going to replace its saltiness? Will the world do it? The devil won’t even if he wanted to which he most heartily does not. We cannot generate it with our sinful selves.
Dear Hiteck,
If you cannot get past my using the lower case ‘g’, which I am sure True Divinity would, then anything else that I would write, would be ignorance to you.
As for ‘repentance’, that is an issue for me and Divinity, not for you, since you are no less mortal, than I.
LBJ was a crooked scoundrel whose policies have bankrupted the United States in less than 50 years and turned 10s of millions of people (including the vast majority of blacks in this country) into government serfs.
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