Good developments

Good news today about illegitimacy rates and young teens: Young teen pregnancy at historically low levels.

It seems our cruel heartless society is encouraging young people to take matters into their own hands and do their part to ensure that they will not end up poor.

Who knew?

This is exactly the kind of thing that the academic left told us would NOT happen.

For the parasitic university researchers haranguing the country about the problems of the "underclass," the poor are merely stupid children, retarded baby-making machines that must be fed, clothed and tolerated by a "caring" society. Things become quite bigoted when questions of race become involved.

Neatly stated, this is the ivory tower view of America's racial polarization: if only blacks and whites would talk, whites would realize that blacks are largely poor because of race, and things would change through government action.

No one can argue with racial dialogue; communication is always beneficial.

But a more important dialogue is needed, between the middle class and the poor, free of the opaque lens of racial politics.

There are many rural white communities that are poor, too. The problems are the same: illegitimacy, divorce, addiction, and low levels of education. All of these impoverish communities by lowering household income (and household income is our primary measure of poverty).

The striking thing about each of these problems is that each results from an individual decision: no one forces a person to drop out of school or to have a baby. But it is a virtual guarantee that a young mother without a diploma or a husband will be poor. A woman raising a child on her own is a household, as defined by the census, and she is likely to be one with a low income, regardless of race.

The quest to eliminate poverty has to be a search for truth. And the sad truth is this: most people become poor through a series of bad life decisions – the decision to drop out of high school, the decision to take a drug, the decision to have unprotected intercourse.

It is not all chance.

The question is: why do some people consistently make decisions that are not in their own long-term interest, decisions that will almost certainly impoverish them and guarantee that they stay that way?

I'm a partial libertarian, but I believe in social responsibility.

Society, not just government, must encourage people to use freedom wisely.

Society, though, often does the opposite: there is little shame in being a single, unwed mother anymore.

Society’s tolerance for such destructive behavior is suicidal.

It is vital that a fourteen-year-old girl look at her older sister, uneducated and struggling to raise a child, and say this to herself: there is no way I am going to let that happen to me.

It is certainly time that the academics making a living studying poverty consider what the rest of America already knows instinctively. But messages like this bounce right off the socialist parasites who study the poverty. To them, the poor are an exotic fauna. They are not interesting in themselves (they actually disgust academic elites with their materialism and sexism), but they are intriguing because they indict American society: how can a free society be fair when allows such people to live so miserably?

Talk of "social responsibility" would clearly threaten these interesting specimens with extinction. Thus the left considers any hint of it to be "blaming the victim."

And it is here that liberal America parts ways with mainstream America.

Those blasted "moral issues" intrude into the poltical world yet again.

- posted by total @ 11/16/2004 06:26:00 AM .