Welfare State

[Travis]

This is kind of long for a forum I think. But its a decent article a buddy sent me. Actually the same buddy that told me about the government taking everyones guns.

The Welfare State Exposed

By Robert Tracinski

It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there

make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in

food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary

shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For

journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary

people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and

rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send

thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy

insurgency. And journalists—myself included--did not expect that the story would not be

about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief

agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about

every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the

past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely

exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state. For the past few days, I have found the news

from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them

to behave in an emergency--indeed; they were not behaving as they have behaved in

other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that

this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a

Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together

to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve

problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to

relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care

of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main

traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve

as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the

spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a

Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires

are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are

repeatedly fired on. "The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National

Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

"'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets she said. They have

M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and

they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will."

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National

Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-

strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be

yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting,

armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have

arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives?

What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why

are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While

watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting

a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is

located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes,

one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they

were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They

have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of

life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—

but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—

and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative

and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the

incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government,

which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this

might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is

to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters-

-not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already

actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely

the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of

individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an

opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property?

They don't, because they don't own anything.

Do they worry about what is going to

happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living?

They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting?

But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is

the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans.

And that is the story that no one is reporting.

[B.O.P.]

Hmmm... Interesting. The sad reality of it is, most - if not all of it - is true. I remember when the news media with cameras rolling first started talking to people in the shelters. The were yelling and screaming about who was going to help them and when the president was going to do something about it. One even said (yelling) "When am I going to get my check?" In the situation she was in, that was her number one priority as it was with many others who stuck their face in front of the camera. One of the snipers (a black man) who was taking shots at doctors trying to evacuate people from a hospital yelled "This is for all the years of oppression!" I thought, WTF does that have to do with the doctors trying to save your own kind?

Thanks for posting that Travis. It sheds a new light on things and answers a few nagging questions I've had about the situation, such as 'What is wrong with this picture? It doesn't make sense what is going on there." Now it does.

[Travis]

For a long time now I have had problems with many people on public aid, people that claim bankrupcy because they ran up their credit cards, people that count on the local and federal govenments for everything. When these people dont get the help they think they need they cry foul. When in all reality they could have kept themselves from the situation in the first place. When I was a younger kid and told my mom that I needed the designer clothes that were all the rage at the time she told me to get a job. Basically saying if I wanted something other than a roof over my head. food. education, etc. I would need to see to it that it happened. To this day I am a stubborn ass and I dont ask for help until I feel I absolutely have to. Most all of those folks put themselves in that situation and kept themselves in that situation. With that I think they get what they get.

[joemomma]

"The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family - which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions - began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to "help"."

The guy who said this would be called a racist by today's standards were it not for the fact that Thomas Sowell is very black. Can you really call it compassion when the government confiscates taxpayers' money and gives it to those who can't or won't earn it? If you look at the history of the Welfare State, in any country, you will see that it is most beneficial to those who administer it.

[Erik Sine]

me agrees with all of the above since day 1

[B.O.P.]

"The assumption that spending more of the taxpayer's money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family - which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars and depressions - began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to "help"."

The guy who said this would be called a racist by today's standards were it not for the fact that Thomas Sowell is very black. Can you really call it compassion when the government confiscates taxpayers' money and gives it to those who can't or won't earn it? If you look at the history of the Welfare State, in any country, you will see that it is most beneficial to those who administer it.

No doubt people like Jessie Jackson, Al Sharpton, et al are at odds with this statement and the guy who wrote it!

I won't get in to my feelings on why there are 3rd and 4th generation people still on welfare. It would sound way too racist even though it only be statistical.

[Travis]

Dont get me wrong. The programs are a good thought and can be of great help to people in need. Unfortunately the great amount of the people that use these programs are not in need due to misfortune. Most are in need due to laziness or obsesive greed. Just to think about it all gets me so aggrivated.

[joemomma]

Dont get me wrong. The programs are a good thought and can be of great help to people in need. Unfortunately the great amount of the people that use these programs are not in need due to misfortune. Most are in need due to laziness or obsesive greed. Just to think about it all gets me so aggrivated.

Travis, I can say the same thing. Don't get me wrong, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That's exactly why things like this should be left to the private sector. Was it the Federal Government that started giving out $2000 checks to anybody from La. with a Social Security #. Is it the Federal Government that's getting ready to hand over hundreds of billions of dollars to a department in the state of La. that has several senior members under investigation for bilking that same Federal Government out of hundreds of millions of dollars already. Would you be so "generous" with your money? It's awfully easy to be wrong about allocating money, when the cost of being wrong is paid by others (taxpayers). At least, if it were left up to individuals here, in the most generous country in the world, the vast majority of the donations would go to help those people in need and not those politicians whose pockets aren't filled yet or whose special interests haven't been "taken care of".

[B.O.P.]

I agree with you guys that there are some that actually do need help. But I believe they are much fewer than most people are willing to admit.

I'm sure I don't have to explain what the welfare situation is in a large metropolitan area in the deep South Many of them have "side jobs" (because playing the welfare game is their first job). They do odd jobs for cash and beg for handouts. And I'm sure they report making that cash, right? Some of them stop in my shop on a semi-regular basis: "Need your floors swept?" "Need your truck washed?" "Have any odd jobs I can do to make some money so I can eat?" The first time I saw one of these characters in the checkout line at the grocery store paying for his purchase with his food card it really pissed me off. I never did give them any handouts before this because there is a food bank for the poor 3 or 4 miles down the road from my shop, so if they really needed food it was within a long walk. Not to mention there is a lot of other help in this county for such things. But after the grocery store "sighting" I don't even have the time to acknowledge them any more because all they want is booze and cigarette money, which they don't get from welfare.

Sorry, this is a sore subject with me. I could rant about it for hours, so I better stop now.