SAN ANTONIO, Texas, September 1, 2014 — The death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. kicked off a firestorm of protests, which were purposely exacerbated by the comments and actions of President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, race hustlers Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and the Democratic media machine.
The Democratic machine responded predictably, fanning the flames and inspiring as much division and hatred as possible. Its reasons were clear: to distract from the ever-growing centralization of power in the federal government and the Democratic policies that sponsor it. Race and class issues continue to detonate powder kegs of emotion around the country. Instead of trying to ease the tension, the Democratic machine focuses its energies on distracting the people from the fact that they are responsible for all of these problems.
There are simple ways to start the process of healing the damage caused by the failed welfare state and War on Poverty. That policy has been a horrible failure and has severely damaged lower income Americans, especially minority Americans.
1. Drug Legalization
The War on Drugs was the beginning of the war on individualism. It greatly expanded the federal government’s ability to control the citizenry; for the first time, the government passed laws to protect the individual from himself. This forever changed the relationship between individual and government in America and led to the paternalistic, Orwellian society we live in today.
Legalizing drugs would immediately and sharply reduce the number of young people being arrested for possession of drugs, while also eliminating the job of drug dealer, which draws young people to the criminal world with the promise of quick money and respect. Simultaneously, it would destroy the drug cartels, which at present our government supports. Due to America’s ability to capture and locate drug shipments, the only people who can afford to take that risk repeatedly are the uber-wealthy cartel drug lords.
Nobel laurete Milton Friedman made a strong and clear argument for the legalization of all drugs. He said, “I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, 10,000 fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there’s a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts, not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug.”
2. Elimination of Mandatory Minimums
Mandatory minimums are sentencing requirements designed to take away the local courts’ discretion when it comes to sentencing an alleged criminal.
Mandatory minimums were implemented in an attempt to reduce the impact of allegedly racist local judges and to equalize sentences for white and black offenders. Like other well-intentioned programs without any basis in reality, it failed miserably. It is now the main reason that so many repeat offenders for minimal crimes spend long periods of time in prison. Additionally, this policy is a huge factor in the massive racial disparities in rates of incarceration.
The Democrats’ main philosophical tenet is that the centralization of power in the federal government is always beneficial, and that the federal government is always more capable and altruistic than local governments and private enterprise. To admit that the federal government has failed in this case would go against everything they believe. That is why Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid refuses to allow a vote on Sen. Rand Paul’s bill that would do away with mandatory minimums.
3. School Choice
School choice should be the civil rights issue of our time. Lower-income individuals are severely disadvantaged due to the schooling that the government forces on their children. Schools in lower income areas consistently produce more dropouts, and graduates who are far less prepared for further education than their counterparts in other schools are.
There is a very clear and simple solution to this problem: Allow the parents to choose which school to send their children to. If parents in a low income area are willing to drive their kids to a better school across town, they should have that right. Instead, under the current system, if you are unfortunate enough to live in a low-income area, your children are relegated to the worst schools in the country.
The only reason that this policy has not been implemented is that it would effectively destroy the teachers’ unions and require teachers to be hired and fired based upon merit. Teacher’s unions donate the most money to Democrat politicians of any single group, so Democrats always fight like hell against this policy.
4. Repeal the Minimum Wage
By refusing to allow people with skills worth less than the minimum wage to charge less for their services, the government denies them the entry-level jobs and critical on-the-job training that would give them skills that would qualify them for better and higher-paying jobs.
Employers who hire people who add less to the bottom line than they are paid are engaged in charity. A business operates with the goal of making profits; otherwise the employer would not be able to pay employees and the company would go out of business.
Employers are forced by the government to discriminate against lower-income, unskilled, minority Americans. This is why Nobel laureate Milton Friedman once referred to the minimum wage law as “the most anti-negro law on the books.”
5. Reform the welfare system
Reforming welfare goes hand-in-hand with school choice and repealing the minimum wage. The vicious cycle for lower income Americans begins with poor Americans receiving the worst schooling in the country. This leads to them having less skills than other Americans, and the minimum wage law often precludes them from getting an entry level job; and, not being able to get a job leads to becoming dependent on the government’s welfare programs.
Democrats purposefully designed the system to have this effect. Being the party of ever-growing centralized government, Democrats greatly benefit by keeping blacks and poor Americans dependent on them. In turn, blacks and poor Americans vote in huge proportion for Democrats (historically blacks vote for Democrats over 90% of the time – even before Obama).
Democrats have always attacked the individual, the family unit and organized religion because they want government to be the ultimate authority in every American’s life and one of the main tools they have used to do this is the welfare system and one of the main tenets of this is the fact that single mother’s are receive significantly greater welfare benefits than families with two parents receive.
Prof. Walter Williams, a black economics professor at George Mason University has done a lot of analysis on this issue and has come to the following conclusions: “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery could not have done, the harshest Jim Crow laws and racism could not have done, namely break up the black family. That is, today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in two parent families. Historically from 1870s to on up to about 1940s, and depending on the city, 75 to 90 percent of black kids lived in two parent families.”
It is shameful and immoral for white, elitist Democrats to keep poor people and minorities down for the sole reason of gaining and keeping fame, money and power. However, don’t expect them to stop anytime soon – not with the current Republican opposition, which sulks away at the slightest mention of race or class.
If these 5 ideas were implemented, it would unshackle the productive potential of lower income Americans, leading to a higher standard of living for all Americans and particularly for black Americans and other minorities.