Tag Archives: morality

A Bit More on Welfare

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…and the insidious trap that it is.   Some states are increasingly shifting the funds they offer for college tuition assistance toward merit awards and away from simple economic need.  Georgia, for instance, calls one of its programs HOPE—Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally.  The Wall Street Journal says

In its 19 years, the program has given out $4.9 billion in merit-based aid to 710,000 in-state students.

Here’s the kicker, though [emphasis added]:

Sarah Beck, a University of Georgia junior, is a typical recipient.  She says her mother, a teacher, and her father, who worked as a nuclear engineer, didn’t have to worry about saving for college because “we knew HOPE would be waiting for me.”

No personal responsibility or commitment at all.  Just use OPM.  She’s not at all alone in this trap, though:

[S]ome students at her school arrive with new cars, paid for by parents who didn’t have to pay tuition.  The cars are known as “Hope-mobiles.”

Unneeded cars, paid for with the benefit of OPM.

Critics of the move decry the loss of funding for low income students who don’t measure up academically.

Shannon McGhee, the associate director of financial planning at Mercer University, [says] African-American and Hispanic students are most likely to benefit from need-based plans because “they have not necessarily had the same educational opportunities as their white peers.”

This may be a valid beef, but her solution is wrong.  Throwing college money at these students will not give them the educational opportunities that already have passed them by.  It will not make up for that lost ground and make these students academically qualified (much less meritoriously so) for college.  The appropriate solution to this shortfall is to improve the educational system in the K-12 arena so all students are competing on the same ground.

But that would take away from “welfare” spending.

The Irrationality of the Gun-Control NLMSM Press

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Here are some rather palpable examples, via The Daily Caller:

LaPierre [National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne] as delusional as any dictator. His speech against music videos, hurricanes has the feel of a Castro rant or Mugabe tirade.
— The Huffington Post’s Jason Cherkis

In Wayne LaPierre’s defense, tone-deafness is a serious condition that afflicts hundreds of thousands of Americans.
— New York Daily News’ Josh Greenman

Wayne LaPierre should have just given this speech to an empty chair on a stage
— The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill

No two ways about: This is gross, awful, dishonest.
— Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall

What is this NRA guy talking about? Blame hurricanes. Blame media. It’s so strange.
— Politico’s Ben White

This is nuts.
— Talking Points Memo’s Ryan J. Reilly

A Press Conference

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Here’s what was said at a recent press conference:

So I’m going to continue to talk to the President and the other leaders up in the Senate.  But, ultimately, they’ve got to do their job.  Right now their job is to make sure that middle-class taxes do not go up and that we have a balanced, responsible package of deficit reduction.

It is there for all to see.  It is a deal that can get done.  But it is not going to be—it cannot be done if every side wants 100 percent.  And part of what voters were looking for is some compromise up here.  That’s what folks want.  They understand that they’re not going to get 100 percent of what they want.  And for some reason, that message has not yet taken up at the White House or in the Senate.

And when you think about what we’ve gone through over the last couple of months—a devastating hurricane, and now one of the worst tragedies in our memory—the country deserves folks to be willing to compromise on behalf of the greater good, and not tangle themselves up in a whole bunch of ideological positions that don’t make much sense.

So I remain not only open to conversations, but I remain eager to get something done.  I’d like to get it done before Christmas.  There’s been a lot of posturing up at the White House and over in the Senate, instead of just going ahead and getting stuff done.  And we’ve been wasting a lot of time.  It is the right thing to do.  I’m prepared to get it done.  But they’re going to have to go ahead and make some adjustments.

Was that Speaker of the House John Boehnor (R, OH)?  Not really.  It was President Barack Obama, and he wasn’t talking about himself and his allies; he was disparaging Republican efforts to avert our fall over the cliff.

Never Let a Crisis….

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The Democrats, led by President Barack Obama and Senators Diane Feinstein (D, CA) and Chuck Schumer (D, NY) want to “discuss” gun control and make it harder/impossible for us to retain our 2nd Amendment rights.  But this would make us more like Europe, and that’s a Good Thing, isn’t it?

Here’s what Europe is blathering on about in re the Newtown mass murder.

[The Newtown massacre] is once again the unavoidable result of a national culture….  Once again, the United States is debating its gun laws, even if the discussion is likely to be short and inconclusive.  But the real thing that must change (though it hardly will), is the misunderstanding that America’s formative myth of “freedom” allows for weapons to be as widespread as smart phones.

And from Süddeutsche Zeitung, this:

Their [Republicans and the gun lobby] opposition to almost any kind of gun control borders on political complicity in murder and manslaughter.

And from Die Welt, this, even as they “recognize” the legitimacy of private ownership of guns:

A country-wide weapons registry would make sense. … [A]t least a ban on semi-automatic weapons, such as the one that existed during the administration of Bill Clinton, makes sense.

And from Stuttgarter Zeitung, this:

[T]this variety of martial liberalism is a relic of a bygone era that no longer fits in the time.

Never mind our Creator’s endowment of rights and the expression of them in our Bill of Rights.  The latter exists to facilitate our satisfaction of our individual endowment of obligations, which includes our obligation to help each other enjoy those inalienable rights.  Which demands an ability to defend ourselves and our fellows by force of arms, if necessary, not only against other members of our compact and intruders from outside it, but also against an overweening, overly intrusive government that is a necessary evil and not the fount of our rights, responsibilities, and freedoms.  Which in turn demands a 2nd Amendment that explicitly acknowledges our inherent right to be adequately armed for executing that self- and mutual defense.

Disarming us, as even the Süddeutsche Zeitung understood elsewhere in its editorial, cannot have prevented such mass murders.  Disarming us would not disarm the criminals, or the insane, or the criminals who would use the insane.  Progressives dismiss this as ridiculous, a catch phrase, but it is no less a truth for that.

Nor has the threat receded in a modern, dangerous world, as the Stuttgarter Zeitung so innocently hopes.  Thinking so is dangerously naïve.

Government has no need to know what its employers have in our possession.  Fishing expeditions, which include a national gun registry with its associated limits on the purpose for which we might be permitted to possess and use a firearm, and of which restrictions on what we are in the end permitted to own are a subset, are at once an early step in the erosion of freedom and a textbook example of why another requirement was written into our Bill of Rights: the need for a separately court-approved search warrant before our government might pry into our private affairs.  A government that assumes, a priori, that its employers are dishonest is a government that, even more so, cannot be trusted.

What those who idolize Government, those who truly think that government is the origin of our rights, responsibilities, and freedoms—rather than an unfortunately necessary tool for helping us preserve our individual liberties and satisfy our individual responsibilities—do not understand is that these are truly individual; our liberties and obligations are individual and are inherent in us as individuals.  Thus, we cannot wish them away onto another entity for preservation or satisfaction.  They cannot be divorced from us any more than our lives can be.

In the end, the only ones who want to disarm a population are those in Government with guilty consciences about their own designs on liberty and those who truly believe that freedom flows from Government and not from God.  Both sorts are dangerous.

Cynical Refusal to Negotiate

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Fox News has this example from the Progressives in Congress.  House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) is refusing even to discuss the possibility of raising the initial eligibility age of Medicare, and Senator Dick Durbin (D, IL) echoes her no-negotiate position.

Raising the Medicare age represents more of the same.  For seniors nearing retirement, it means less security for themselves and their families.  It betrays the bedrock promise of Medicare: that Americans who work hard and take responsibility all their lives can know dignity in their later years.

Yet how can Americans know dignity in our later years?  An overweening government forces us onto the largesse of strangers for, in the present case, our health concerns, and it denies us our ability to set aside those funds for our own future welfare thereby denying us our ability to satisfy our duty to see to our own welfare to the maximum extent possible?  We are denied our dignity by an intrusive government, led by Progressives who refuse to negotiate reform.