Travis Snyder of neoperspectives.com addresses a very important point that so many Americans fail to realize: Helping the poor and less fortunate is NOT a Constitutional right. You can also include the business of education as well. If you take the time to read the founding documents of this country, you will see that this was never the intent of the founding fathers of this country. Many African-Americans in particular have fallen for this notion that because of slavery, the government “owes” us, however, the definition of what is “owed” varies with each person that believes this ideology.
Aren’t you forgetting about slavery, brutha?
My opinion is simply this: If we (black Americans) have the natural ability to improve our situation without government intervention (and we do), then by all means we should take that path. By buying into the notion that “we can never be free” unless the government does this or that, we are in effect crippling ourselves as well as the generations of black Americans to follow us. What is sad is that previous generations were able to do more with less. All blacks wanted back then was to be left alone so that they could live and improve their lives in a free society. I believe programs like Affirmative Action and state sponsored welfare ( I make this distinction because I believe that local charities operated by the people should always exist) were greatly needed at one time to even the playing field (so to speak); however these same programs today are at best giving us a false sense of security and achievement that is not based solely on our own merit. These programs need to be greatly overhauled with a solid plan to eliminate them at specific time in the future. I think that programs like the two that I mention is in fact the debt that was owed to us. The rest is up to us.
I think Larry Elder in his book The Ten Things you Can’t Say in America, drives the point home in the following excerpt:
Whitney Young, the founder of the Urban League, was one of the first blacks to push for an affirmative action plan. In Ending Affirmative Action, writer Terry Eastland says that Young called for a “compensatory, preferential Marshall Plan for black America.” In 1963, Young urged a “decade” of preferences to level the playing field. A decade! That would have ended affirmative action in 1973! Young’s board of directors, however, revolted. The president of the Urban League in Pittsburgh said the demand for affirmative action would cause the public to quite properly ask, ‘What the blazes are these guys up to? They tell us that for years that we must buy [non-discrimination] and then they say, ‘It isn’t what we want.’ A member of the Urban League in New York objected to what he called ‘the heart of it –the business of employing Negroes [because they are Negroes].’
Now, here is Travis Snyder:
Now, it is said that the Federal government should be used as a tool to help the ‘poor’ and ‘less fortunate’ and to further the ‘public good’. As author Ayn Rand wrote, “The idea that ‘the public interest’ supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others.” (29) In a truly free society there are no provisions, at the Federal level, to help the ‘poor’ or ‘less fortunate’. Indeed, any provisions made, at the Federal level, are legalized theft and are inherently Tyrannical. If citizens do not voluntarily donate in order to solve a crisis then the society does not believe that there is a crisis worth addressing. This is self-evident. Power given to elitists who believe they, not the citizens, see all the wrongs that need righted is a formula that, regardless of their good intentions, can only end in corruption and the abuse of power. The elitists are fighting for a return to Monarchy. (more…)
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