Fwd: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey

Second of the items lne.com never sent to the list (that I have seen, 9-10 hours later). Begin forwarded message:

From: Tim May Date: January 2, 2004 1:02:20 AM PST To: cypherpunks@lne.com Subject: Re: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey

On Jan 2, 2004, at 12:03 AM, Tim May wrote:

...

So Kennedy's liberals scratched their heads and came up with a new plan. "Relief" would be converted to a series of state and national programs, no longer handled locally. And the bad connotations of "relief" would be changed by the new and positive name "entitlement."

Money handed out to various folks would be their "entitlement," something they were _owed_. Other related names would be "social services" and, of course, liberal mention of "children" and "nutrition." Ergo programs like WIC ("Women, Infants, and Children"). Ergo, "Head Start."

And I should have elaborated on the family system effects of the new welfare system: since the "entitlements" were not given to families with husbands in the household, this made marriage a bad idea for those wanting to get welfare.

A young girl could go from the bottom of the pecking order in her household to the top in her own apartment, with an income from welfare that increased with each baby she had. So we had the spectacle of 14-year-old girls being given their own apartments by Big Brother, paid for with taxes taken from working suckers.

The effects of this are so corrosive as to practically be unexplainable to normal people: households solely dependent on handouts from government, fathers completely absent (except in sneak visits), a disrespect for those who work, the boys in the household anxious to hang out on the streets below rather than be with Momma, the crime that comes from this kind of hanging out, self-loathing (it seems likely) that leads to lashing out at "whitey," and a perpetuating cycle as the young girls seek to get their own "cribs" so the process can repeat and expand.

This is why so many black families today are into their third or even fourth generation of welfare life.

By the way, part of the reason Kennedy wanted to "remove the stigma of relief" was because the decade of the 1950s had been especially bad for the urban poor. Many blacks had moved from farms in the south to cities like Washington, New York, Cincinnati, Oakland, Chicago, etc. Partly they had moved to work in factories during the war, partly because automation on the farms had displaced manual laborers, partly because they heard of the success of other blacks who had moved north.

But they were moving into the cities just as the whites were leaving. (And the whites were not leaving because the blacks were coming in...rather, the new jobs were increasingly in the suburbs, and as highways and freeways and ring roads were built around cities, and as cars became plentiful, and as families grew, many of the city-born whites were moving into the massive new subdivisions being built out in the suburbs.)

So the blacks got to the inner cities with mostly only manual labor skills, just as such jobs were vanishing under automation and through a shift to the suburbs.

Now what government _should have done_ circa the early 1960s is this: Nothing. Except to cut taxes to encourage even more business, and to maybe point out to blacks that they should slow down their move to the cities. (By the way, the same move to the cities was happening in other countries, which is why Mexico City now has something like 20 million residents, most of them very poor.)

But instead of letting the dice fall where they may, letting the bad effects discourage other blacks from moving to the cities, Kennedy set his advisors to the problem of solving "urban poverty." They expanded welfare and entitlements, ostensibly because America "could afford it" (the 1950s having been a prosperous period).

Precisely the wrong thing to do. It encouraged even more blacks to flock to the cities, and once started, once established, the welfare spigot could not be turned off, could not be denied to the newcomers. Whoops.

And none of the planners, I expect, saw the effects of the law of unintended consequences, that they would disincentive blacks from seeking hard jobs, that multigenerational welfare would become the norm, and that blacks would be seen by those doing so well in the rapidly-expanding, prosperous suburbs as some kind of throwback to plantation life. The various "demands" by black leaders, the reverse racism ("honkie mofo"), the whole hatred for learning ("reading be for whitey") all combined with the welfare state in these cities to create this gutterization of the negro.

Even when the full magnitude of this developing train wreck was obvious even to the liberals, they didn't pull back from the brink and say "Let's stop this train wreck." Nope, they said the problem was "not enough money." So benefits were expanded in the 1970s, with more Medicare, Medical, larger payments...the idea was to pay enough to get people "back on their feet." But of course, human nature being what it is, most took the higher payments and bought nicer stuff, hence the color televisions found in every "crib."

And the huge influxes of Mexicans during the 70s and 80s magnified the problem (to turn down Mexicans for the same "entitlements" that blacks were getting would not have been kosher, would it?). The effect was that large chunks of cities now had urbanized Mexican ghettoes, paid for with dollars coming from the taxed suckers out in the suburbs.

Whoops. Another train wreck.

And it continues. Finally, even Bill Clinton, a Democrat, tried to put the brakes on welfare. It's worked in some ways, but not in other ways. Just too many "entitlements" to stop the hemorrhaging of money.

(To those who claim the biggest recipients of "welfare" are corporations, review again what I wrote about "sources and sinks." And look at the $40 billion hole California is in. It isn't because of any "welfare to corporations." The "services" sector is a black hole sucking in nearly all of the tax monies collected in California.)

The problem is that some well-meaning social planners thought they could fix a fundamental problem (poor people moving into cities) by giving money to the poor people in cities. It not only didn't work, it worsened the problem in multiple ways and largely caused the "racial" divisions of today.

--Tim May "Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound"

--Tim May "That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." --Samuel Adams