Category Archives: The Welfare State

Three Takeaways from the Dawn Loggins Story

Culture, Economics, Media, Occupy Wall Street, Strategies For Advancing Liberty, The Welfare State

Whatever your philosophy or wherever you find yourself in the political spectrum, one thing I think we can all agree on is that we are living in difficult economic times. Most of us, if we haven’t experienced it ourselves, know someone who has lost his or her job or is otherwise struggling to keep up with increases in the price of living. Times are tough for many if not most of us.

In these difficult times, I think it’s important to remember to persevere rather than throw up our hands and quit. One could understand a teenager giving up on her future if she was abandoned by her parents, bullied at school, and even homeless. Who could expect any other result?

Don’t tell that to 18 year-old Dawn Loggins. She experienced all this and more and has been accepted to…Harvard?

This is such an inspiring story that I don’t want to give much more of it away. Really, I hope that everyone who reads this post reads this four part series by Alicia Banks for The Shelby Star. This story is nothing short of amazing.

There were three main takeaways I got from reading this series:

1. Dawn’s Personal choices made all the difference. Every cliché you have ever heard about becoming a successful person applies to Dawn Loggins (ex: “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity,” “when the going gets tough…” etc.). Rather than complaining about how unfair life is or blaming all her woes on the 1%,* or even her parents who abandoned her, she took it upon herself to improve her situation.

2. Sometimes one has to break the rules or violate the law to do the “right” thing. Dawn may not have been successful if the law was followed to the letter**. What if the principal or the school’s guidance counselor would have called DSS? Here’s an excerpt from part 2:

No one risked calling the Department of Social Services about Dawn, who was 17 at the time and had been homeless.

Those who cared about Dawn could have lost her to foster care if they alerted the authorities to her situation. Putnam was afraid Dawn wouldn’t be able to take classes she had lined up for her senior year at a different school.

Putnam and Kolton made sure Dawn had everything she needed: Clothes, food, shelter and Burns.

In situations like Dawn’s, Jane Shooter, assistant director for the county DSS, said social workers would have attempted to locate her parents and understand the situation. If they determined a child needed to be placed in foster care, their first attempts would be to find a safe guardian or foster family in the area. But that’s not always possible.

Members of the Burns community took care of one of their own on their own.

But was this the right thing to do?

“I can only say if you suspect a child is neglected or abused, by North Carolina law, you’re mandated to report it,” Shooter said.
Children in foster care age out of DSS’s protection when they turn 18 years old. Dawn turned 18 on Feb. 9.

“There’s nothing we can do now that she turned 18,” Shooter said.

3. Despite what some on the Left believe, regular people are more than willing to help others who are struggling without the government forcing them to do so via wealth redistribution (especially those who are doing all they can to help themselves). In addition to a few very key people who helped Dawn through high school, since this story was published, there has been an outpouring of support from regular people who want to help Dawn pay for her Harvard education.

Of course, Dawn’s story isn’t typical but neither is her work ethic. Was she successful despite her hardships or because of them? Was she smart because she studied hard or did she study hard because she was smart enough to realize doing so would be her most likely ticket out of poverty?

These chicken/egg questions aside, one thing is clear: we could all learn a thing or two about pursuing the American dream from a teenager by the name of Dawn Loggins.

Hat Tip: Neal Boortz
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Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

The Life of Julia… who really wins?

Democrats, Economics, Election '12, General, Government Regulation, Healthcare, Hope n' Change, Politics, The Nanny State, The Welfare State

President Obama’s campaign has put together “The Life of Julia“, following a woman from cradle to grave to show how she benefits from the enlightened benificence of President Barack Obama.

The reality, though, is rather different. Let’s look now at “The Life of Julia”:

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Quincy

Open Thread: If I Wanted America to Fail…

Blog Discussions, Civil Liberties, Corruption, Credit Crisis, Crime and Punishment, Culture, Democrats, Economics, Election '12, Energy Policy, Environment, Freedom of Association, Government Regulation, Hope n' Change, Human Rights, Individual Rights, Legal, Media, Military, Multimedia, Non-Intervention, Occupy Wall Street, Open Thread, Politics, Property Rights, Republicans, Security, The Welfare State, Theory and Ideas, War on Terror, Zoning and Land-Use

FreeMarketAmerica.org has released a great video (above) called “If I Wanted America to Fail.” It’s a pretty decent list of policies one would want to implement to cause America to fail but it’s far from complete.

Here are a few suggestions of my own:

If I wanted America to fail, I would want congress to abdicate its war powers and give those powers to the president so he could commit acts of war against any country he desires for any or no reason at all.

If I wanted America to fail, I would want these undeclared wars to be open-ended with no discernable war aim. This would lead to blowback and create more enemies for America.

If I wanted America to fail, I would have troops deployed around the world to make sure the world is “safe for democracy” but would topple regimes, even those elected by the people of these countries, if the president found the new leaders not to his liking. This would create even more enemies who would try to cause America to fail.

If I wanted America to fail, I would do away with due process – even for American citizens who the president considers “enemy combatants.” I would want the president to have the ability to detain these people indefinitely, ship them to a foreign country, and even give the president the authority to kill these people anywhere in the world they are found.

If I wanted America to fail, I would have the ATF sell arms to Mexican drug cartels so they could kill innocent people on both sides of the border. I would name this operation after a lame action movie franchise and pretend to know nothing about it when details were made public (It’s not like the media would have any interest in investigating this deadly policy because this is a Democrat administration).

Now it’s your turn. What are the policies being implemented now that you would want implemented if your goal was to make America fail?

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

Milton Friedman on Libertarianism and Humility

Economics, Education, Fiscal Policy, Free Trade, Freedom, History, Libertarians, Liberty, Monetary Issues, Multimedia, Strategies For Advancing Liberty, Taxation, The Welfare State, Theory and Ideas, War on Terror

On August 14, 1990, Milton Friedman gave a speech at the International Society for Individual Liberty’s 5th World Libertarian Conference on the subject of libertarianism and humility. There are many adjectives which can be ascribed to libertarians but “humble” usually isn’t one of them. Among the quotable parts of the speech, Friedman said the following:

On the one hand, I regard the basic human value that underlies my own beliefs as tolerance based on humility. I have no right to coerce someone else because I cannot be sure that I am right and he is wrong. On the other hand, some of our heros…people who have, in fact, done the most to promote libertarian ideas, who have been enormously influential, have been highly intolerant as human beings and have justified their views, with which I largely agree, in ways that I regard as promoting intolerance.

In searching for the above transcription of what I thought was very profound and wise, I found a couple of bloggers who thought this particular quotation as “an inadequate defense of liberty” or one of the “failures” of Milton Friedman.

I happen to disagree with these notions.

Maybe because I have been humbled in realizing that I had been wrong on some issues of great importance. By far the most difficult (yet ultimately liberating) post I have ever written was the post in which I declared that I was wrong about my support for the war in Iraq. I was so certain that regime change in Iraq would bring about peace in the Middle East and freedom would take hold. I thought the Ron Paul and big “L” Libertarian position on preemptive war was naïve and dangerous but now I believe the opposite to be true (for reasons I stated in the aforementioned post).

Having experiencing this, I can’t help but think that Friedman was right to say that each of us should be open to the possibility we may be wrong. If we aren’t open to this possibility, what is the point of debating an issue? Obviously, if I argue that X is correct and my opponent says Y is correct, I’m going to do my best to convince my opponent that I am right and s/he is wrong (meanwhile, my opponent is doing the same).

But what if I realize in the course of the debate that my opponent is at least partially right about Y being correct and/or that my reasoning is flawed or the facts do not support X? As a normal human being, I might not concede right away but if I am being intellectually honest, I’ll revise my thinking based on new information or new reasoning I hadn’t considered.

If Milton Friedman was willing to be open to the possibility of being wrong, how could I, someone whose mind will never in the same league as his, be so stubborn?

One thing I notice in watching Friedman debate people who are diametrically opposed to his positions was how patient he was with them. Something that many of us libertarians seem to forget is that much of what we believe to be true is counterintuitive to at least half of the people we encounter on a daily basis because many of these people have not been exposed to our philosophy. Friedman understood this. He knew that much of what he was saying was new territory for many who would hear his lectures or read his books.

Before he could make the case about any of his ideas to others, he had to be satisfied that the facts backed up his theory. These two sentences from the NPR obituary for Friedman summed up his approach beautifully:

Friedman was an empiricist, whose theories emerged from his study of the evidence, not the other way around. He also was a champion of the free market and small government.

We are supposed to believe this to be a weakness? I find this to be so refreshing!

Stephen Littau
http://fpffressminds.blogspot.com/

How far we have fallen…

Civil Liberties, Commerce Clause, Constitution, Culture, Democracy, Government Incompetence, Government Regulation, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Legal, Point/Counterpoint, Politics, Socialism, Supreme Court, The Welfare State, Theory and Ideas

Reading the point/counterpoint posts on the question of how the supreme court would decide on Obamacares constitutionality, was quite disturbing to me in several ways.

On the one hand I was heartened, because clearly both Brad and Doug are sane and rational folks with a reasonably solid background in both law and politics, and a foundational understanding of the constitution…

Of course, that only highlights how many people in this country are not.

Any reading of the constitution… of the very intent of the founding of this nation… makes it clear that our federal government is meant to be one of of limited and enumerated powers. If the government can mandate this, they can mandate anything. This is the fundamental argument about the necessity for a limiting principle to any government act.

And anyone who doesn’t want unlimited, unconstrained government can see that. Sadly, it seems that the idea of unlimited, unconstrained government is quite popular in some quarters… even with some supreme court justices.

The basic liberal/progressive/leftist argument for socialized medicine is “we should do this even if it IS illegal and unconstitutional, because it’s the right thing to do so the supreme court should uphold it”.

I.E. “It’s good because we want it, and therefore it should be legal because it is good; and we need to get rid of this whole “limited government” thing, because it gets in the way of us doing what is right and good.”

What I also find heartening is that both Brad and Doug both seem to have a good sense of all of this…

But that is also disturbing…

Because both of them seem to share the same actual opinion:

Both believe that Obamacare is ACTUALLY unconstitutional, and should be struck down…

…It’s just that Brad is cynical enough about the supreme court and the political aspects of the decision that he thinks enough justices will be able to argue themselves into ignoring the constitution and doing what they want to do, rather than what is right.

… and Doug believes that there’s a good possibility of that as well; he just has a bit more hope that they won’t.

… and if you look around the commentariat, that’s pretty much the split of positions that every other knowledgable observer has as well.

And if that isn’t disturbing to you, then you really have no idea what is going on, do you?

Chris Byrne
I am a cynically romantic optimistic pessimist. I am neither liberal, nor conservative. I am a (somewhat disgruntled) muscular minarchist… something like a constructive anarchist.

Basically what that means, is that I believe, all things being equal, responsible adults should be able to do whatever the hell they want to do, so long as nobody’s getting hurt, who isn’t paying extra

http://anarchangel.blogspot.com
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