Posted on 05/01/2015 6:58:31 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
President Barack Obama responded to the Baltimore riots with a heartfelt bout of self-righteous hectoring.
Supposedly, we all know whats wrong with Baltimore and how to fix it, but dont care enough. Not only is this attitude highhanded, it rests on a flagrantly erroneous premise.
President Obama doesnt have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. His solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years. Dating back to the Kerner Commission after the riots of the 1960s, the Lefts go-to solution to urban problems has been more social programs. Since then, weve gotten more social programs and just as many urban problems.
Exhibit A is Baltimore itself. The city hasnt been neglected. It has been misgoverned into the ground. It is a Great Society city that bought fully into the big-government vision of the 1960s, and the bitter fruit has been corruption, violence, and despair.
Obamas solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years. We dont know all the facts surrounding Freddie Grays tragic death. But as a general matter, it is easy to believe that the Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaccountable because most of the Baltimore government is that way.
This is a failure exclusively of Democrats, unless the root causes of Baltimores troubles are to be traced to its last Republican mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, who left office in 1967. And it is an indictment of a failed model of government.
The city has been shedding jobs and people for decades, including in the 1990s when the rest of the country was booming.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
What would you employ the inner city population with if not manufacturing?
Is there any other economic activity that can employ thousands of low skilled people? Why else would the rest of the world subsidize manufacturing to export to the US?
Yes, it was.
I'm looking for solutions. Sure, step one zero out the alphabet agencies.
For the most part, they are currently unemployable -- uneducated (or under-educated), unmotivated and irresponsible, accepting of a lifestyle based on government handouts.
There needs to be a broad revolution in both education and welfare -- not to mention attitude -- in order for the current inhabitants to be productive members of society.
Thus, it isn't the departure of manufacturing that created this regrettable situation. Nor would the return of manufacturing solve it.
I agree with you, but then what? You have to be able to show an alternative.
You can't tell someone to "get a job" and then take all the jobs away.
Of course not. But my point was: that's a separate issue.
I.e., the inner cities are not the way they are because manufacturing jobs have gone overseas.
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.Johnson's pledge of a great society was always premised on the identity of society and government. And indeed, your typical liberal will be unable to distinguish between the two because their rhetoric has systematically obfuscated the fact that the difference between society and government is freedom. As Paine demonstrated two centuries ago.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; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others. - Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Government is a necessary evil, so it cannot be good.
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