Wednesday, 22 September 2010
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EXPANDING ENTITLEMENT
President Obama today announced a new direction for American foreign aid.
"Put simply, the United States is changing the way we do business," Obama said at the summit of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.
"For too long, we've measured our efforts by the dollars we spent and the food and medicines that we delivered. But aid alone is not development. Development is helping nations to actually develop, moving from poverty to prosperity," he said. "Consider the millions of people who have relied on food assistance for decades. That's not development, that's dependence, and it's a cycle we need to break. Instead of just managing poverty, we have to offer nations and peoples a path out of poverty."
I applaud the president's apparent motives, and I approve of his plan to spend my money in generosity to economically-challenged countries. Seriously.
There is one thing that bothers me, though.
Wasn't it just yesterday--literally--when the news reported that poverty in America is at an all-time high? Even higher than during The Great Depression?
Where did we get the audacity to believe that, after 50 years of abject failure in our own War on Poverty, we can expand our program to rescue the rest of the world? If we have tried increasing our move toward socialism since the 1930s, and it has backfired on us, as the news reports, what makes us think we have anything to offer to the world?
The exact same rhetoric has been thrown around for decades. "People don't want a hand out, just a hand up." Give a man a fish, teach a man to fish, all that fine speech-making. Isn't it time someone asks whether this multi-generational welfare state ends up enabling a poverty mindset? Does President Obama hear the words he is saying? Does he see the irony of it? "Moving from poverty to prosperity?" "That's not development, that's dependence." "We have to offer nations and peoples a path out of poverty."
Hello! I live in Price Hill! I'm surrounded by Section 8 housing, needy people, single moms, barefoot children and crackhead parents. I am watching the effects of entitlement programs from a front-row seat. Where is the "path" our president refers to leading, exactly?
What's the definition of insanity? Thinking that doing MORE of something that fails will make it succeed.
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