How did we get here?

How on earth did we elect the most liberal candidate for President ever? The opinion pages and sites are full of answers. I think some of them are spot on and some not.

I think we have to go back to the dreaded sixties for the genesis of this. The Lyndon Johnson administration was a landmark administration. I personally think it was a disaster, but history making nonetheless. The difference between the New Deal programs and the Great Society programs were very stark. In the New Deal in the Roosevelt administration while they drastically increased government and took money from producers to give to non-producers, the difference was that they attempted to give a hand up. They attempted to give men and women some pride back by putting them to work. Some of the programs had good results many not. The programs of Johnson for the most part though, gave direct payments. They did not create jobs other than government administration jobs. There are of course exceptions but most of the new programs made government a new source for income for people down on their luck. The government in practice went into competition with lower wage jobs. We know of course that when you compete with an entity that can print money en masse you are going to lose. As subsistence and more importantly benefits came to these people, the employers offering low wage jobs turned to automation, outsourcing, eventually illegals etc to find sources of workers.

These low wage jobs while not attractive to some people can be stepping stones to other jobs Just as importantly they provide vital self respect that comes with work. Government subsistence brings no such respect. It brings inner shame, societal scorn and other unintended results. Unintended results are one of the main outcomes of government policy. This had long range results in the American family as well, especially in the inner cities. Before these days families held together through tough times. Money was only one of the reasons. When the government became the bread winner, the support of the family unit became less important to the recipients.

Now we turn the page and we are forty years into this period. We have experienced activist groups, welfare rights groups, community organizers which exist for the expressed purpose not only to gain acceptance for people living on welfare and the difference forms of government support but to convince all involved that they deserve even more of the same. It is no longer their lives to turn around, but the government's role to turn it around. We all watched (I hope in horror) at Peggy Joseph who believes Barak Obama is going to make the world perfect so she doesn't need to worry about making her payments anymore.

Here we are at a crossroads. If we continue down this road the whole thing may go up in flames. It is not just that it is taking more and more taxes to pay for all the entitlements and pushes more people from producers to receivers, it is taking a costly toll in human lives. People like Miss Joseph no longer consider their lives their own to fix. How can she become one of the producers when she doesn't consider it her job? How can we watch this happen and not consider it to be cruel? All along the way we could have stopped it and we did not. This is informative because it can still happen but we all must look at the solutions. The politicians can't do it for us. I will write further on this subject in the next installment.