Good advice!

hat tip Bookworm

An incredible sense of entitlement

DAvid Greenfield writes at Sultan Knish,

The angriest portion of the population lives in subsidized homes, goes to subsidized schools, shops with food stamps and even works at subsidized government jobs servicing the needs of the aforementioned. MSNBC talking heads claimed that the rioters and looters targeted the grocery and check cashing places that were oppressing the community. The only community they were oppressing was that of taxpayers.

Rioters don’t gleefully loot stores of snacks and liquor while posing for selfies because they’re outraged and oppressed, but because their sense of entitlement has turned them into amateur sociopaths.

None of this is about oppression or poverty. It’s about an incredible sense of entitlement.

We’ve blown past the antiquated mores in which living on charity was shameful. What’s shameful now is not spending enough money to subsidize the inflated entitlement of the perpetually outraged.

All the proposed progressive policy solutions have one thing in common; less responsibility. From wrecking the criminal justice system to pouring even more money into the giant urban pit, they ask America to take more risks and responsibility while expecting even less from Baltimore’s residents.

The question is why is the average business in a depressed urban area run by immigrants who just got off the plane with few other resources than a large family and a willingness to work their way into the ground? And it’s one of those questions that answer themselves.

It’s not racism. It’s not because life on a particular street is utterly hopeless. If it were, the Chinese or Indians couldn’t make a go of it there.

Hanging out with your friends and committing petty crimes that escalate until they lead to that dreaded “prison pipeline” is a lot more fun than working fourteen hours a day so your kids can go to college.

Especially if the rest of the country can be induced to subsidize your lifestyle using violence and guilt.

The only answer to a sense of entitlement is perspective. Our values offer us perspective. They teach us responsibility by telling us that the things that really matter are the ones that we work hard for.

The left took away those values and the sense of responsibility. They divided America into oppressors and victims. They stirred up hate mobs to burn and loot over the outrage of the moment, radicalizing irresponsibility and feeding entitlement. But the victims aren’t the ones who live off other people.

They’re the oppressors.

Victims work for a living. Oppressors live off them. The victims take responsibility for their lives. Oppressors only show entitlement.

Read more here

Government-induced dependency

William McGurn argues in the Wall Street Journal that Baltimore's problems are not about race, but about government-induced dependency.

...These supposed solutions do this by substituting federal transfers for fathers and families. They do it by favoring community organizing and government projects over private investment. And they do it by propping up failing public-school systems that operate as jobs programs for the teachers unions instead of centers of learning.

If our inner-city African-American communities suffer disproportionately from crippling social pathologies that make upward mobility difficult—and they do—it is in large part because they have disproportionately been on the receiving end of this five-decade-long progressive experiment in government beneficence.

How do we know? Because when we look at a slice of white America that was showered with the same Great Society good intentions—Appalachia—we find the same dysfunctions: greater dependency, more single-parent families and the absence of the good, private-sector jobs that only a growing economy can create.

Read more here.

A large, dependent, easily-mobilized underclass

As he links to an article on welfare reform by Megan McArdle in Bloomberg View, Glenn Reynolds makes the astute observation that

Yes, but the Democrats’ political strategy requires a large, dependent, easily-mobilized underclass.

Megan reprints the chart the U.S. Census Bureau publishes each year, showing the historical path of the poverty rate:

Read Megan's analysis here.

Why do people fail? Why do they succeed?

Daniel Greenfield writes that

the support of the state isn’t enough for individuals or for businesses. Obama lavishly doled out government money to Green Energy companies only to see them fail. With corporate welfare, as with social welfare, the need for government money is a reliable predictor of failure.

Those who cannot succeed on their own, will not succeed through the government.

There is an entire academic industry dedicated to turning out proofs of racism to explain failure and yet there are indisputable studies out there documenting things such as the diminished grade levels and higher crime rates for students from single parent homes on a worldwide scale.

While the left pushes harder for its post-family world of powerful institutions, there are reams of data showing how destructive trading the family for the state is. And there is no group of people that embodies that better than African-Americans whose lives have been taken over by the state.

A basic difference between Asian-Americans and African-Americans is that the former are most likely to be married and the latter are least likely to be married. That may be why Asian students succeed in the same “bad” urban schools that are supposedly failing the other minority students.

We are more than the sum of our institutions, we are our parents and our grandparents, we are the things we read and the things we believe, we are the sense of mission that brought our ancestors through thousands of years of trouble and we are their strengths and their weaknesses.

It’s not institutions that make our successes possible. It is our beliefs that make all the difference.