The End of Control from Sultan Knish, Daniel Greenfield

Pathological Altruism from Carpe Diem, Mark Perry.

 A Nation of Kids on Speed in the WSJ by Pieter Cohen and Nicholas Rasmussen.

Excerpt:

 Stimulants can certainly benefit some young children with truly disabling ADHD. However, history has already taught us that overprescribing stimulants to millions of Americans leads to dependence, addiction and overdose. By medicating children for wiggling in their chairs, losing their homework and shouting out answers, we are not teaching them vital coping skills to manage their behavior. Instead, we are teaching them to take a pill. One day, we’ll look back and wonder: Why did we do this? Again.

Illegal Immigration: Elite Illiberality by Victor Davis Hanson IN National Review Online.

Excerpts:

The elites favor de facto amnesty for a variety of self-interested reasons. For the corporate echelon, creating a guest-worker program and granting amnesty — without worrying about securing the border first — ensures continued access to millions of cheap laborers from Latin America. The United States may be suffering the most persistent unemployment since the Great Depression. There may be an unemployment rate of over 15 percent in many small towns in the American Southwest. American businesses may be flush with record amounts of cash, and farm prices may be at record levels. But we are still lectured that without cheap labor from south of the border, businesses simply cannot profit.

The elites simply turn a blind eye to out-of-work Americans, the low wages of illegal laborers, and the cynicism of using up human capital and letting the state pick up the subsequent social costs. How odd that profit-making from cheap labor is considered liberal, while concern for low-paid American workers is written off as xenophobia.

HKO Comments:

This an example of a LINO-  a liberal in name only; one more interested in the appearance of liberalism than true liberal results.

“Some argue that redistribution to the poor is social insurance that protects all of us from misfortune. What’s wrong with social insurance where the unfortunate receive payouts? Nothing. The problem, of course, is creating insurance with payouts suitable for a population with high incomes and then applying it to a population only able to produce low incomes. In that case, transfer payments masquerade as insurance. Insurance is only insurance if the demographics covered by the insurance can afford the true cost of the premiums.”

Excerpt From: Conard, Edward. “Unintended Consequences.” Penguin Group, USA, 2012-04-25. iBooks.

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Check out this book on the iBookstore: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/unintended-consequences/id524193321?mt=11

Jaff Jacoby

From Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe, Is this any way to help the poor?

Excerpts:

At the end of 2012, a record47.8 million people were on food stamps. Of the 115 million households in the United States, 23 million — one in five — are on the food dole.

It wasn’t so long ago that such a degree of dependency would have been inconceivable. In 2001, according to federal data, 17.3 million people were receiving food aid. In little more than a decade, the food stamp rolls have almost tripled.

Is this any way to help the poor? FDR didn’t think so. In his annual message to Congress in 1935, President Roosevelt warned that “continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber.” The father of the New Deal knew that “to dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of a sound policy. It is in violation of the traditions of America.”

It is a mark of how far we have declined that a political figure who dared to say such a thing today would be denounced as heartless, a hater of the poor, even a racist — as Newt Gingrich found out when he tried to make an issue of soaring food stamp rates during the presidential campaign. When Massachusetts lawmakers last year tried to prevent electronic benefit cards from being used to pay for tattoos, guns, or jewelry, Governor Deval Patrick vetoed the measure, saying he would not be a part of “humiliating poor people” or making them “beg for their benefits.”

FDR feared the effect of long-term dependence on government. Political leaders today enable it.

Welfare corrupts in so many ways. What it does to taxpayers is bad, and what it does to welfare recipients is worse. But what it is doing to our nation’s character and deepest values may well be worst of all.

HKO

Rationalizations for entitlements have turned into justifications for theft. What was once a benefit for short term displacement has expanded into a lifestyle.  This should be expected when a federal bureaucracy is created to help the disadvantaged: maintaining and growing the disadvantaged becomes the means to secure the existence of the bureaucracy.  The bureaucracy does not serve us; we serve the bureaucracy.