Day: September 20, 2006

Hi Guys,

Loyal amp podie here with feedback on Tuesday’s 12 Sept hour#2 show specifically the caller form Montana (I think):

(1) LBJ took office after Kennedy’s assassination. SO he was in office in 1964, then elected on his own in 64 taking office in 65. Don’t be so quick to denigrate the caller’s take on historical events.

(2) The caller the tried to talk about how the Civil Rights Act of 64 broke the family.

May I elaborate, because I think I understood his comment and there is some basis in fact for what he is saying. (I too lived in this era. And you youngsters may not appreciate the nuances)

Let’s remember the “Law of Unintended Consequences”. Especially where government is concerned, there are ALWAYS those unintended consequences.

Let me set the stage for the caller’s point.

(A) The Social Security Insurance, a giant Ponzi scheme (but that is another matter for another day), had the unintended consequence of weakening the multi-generational family. (I charitably say “unintended”. A strong family, like strong churches, fraternal organizations, and a strong civil society can obviate the need for government to take power over the people. For the government to grow out of its Constitutional bounds, it needs crises and kill alternatives.) By giving welfare to old folks, it took them out of the multi-generational family. Grandma and Grandpa retire and move to Florida. In the old days, they would live on the family farm or, in my family’s case, in the same apartment building, where they could provide help and support to the family unit. Old folks “need” their children’s help for certain tasks (i.e., things that require strength and agility) and the children need the old folk’s help for certain tasks (i.e., watch the kids while Mom runs to the store). Have a problem, you can always borrow a few bucks from Grandma or Mom. No need for gubamint, if you can get all the help from the family living in close proximity. Social Security Insurance welfare gave the old folks the financial freedom to abdicate this essential familial responsibility. It doesn’t take a village to raise a child; it does take a family to raise everyone’s standard of living. SSI allows the old folks to abscond with the SSI money and who takes their place? The gubamint is empowered to do all sorts of things — “public” “education” (that’s neither public; nor educational), Welfare, AFDIC, Food stamps, rent control, yada yada.

(B) The War on Poverty further broke the family by UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES of its “requirements”. A woman with children could draw welfare if there was no man living in the home. Men were then thus freed of their familial responsibilities. Another consequence was that women became farmers of children. More kids; more welfare. Young girls could get more “stuff” by getting pregnant. It spawned an “immoral” generation. “Immoral” not in the church sense, but in the sense that the family unit served no further purpose. The gubamint would do it all for you. Men could fornicate with abandon. Women were encouraged to be “liberated”. That broke the backs of the churches.

(C) LBJ’s GUNS AND BUTTER tried to spend for welfare to win the war on poverty and the Viet Nam “ersatz war”. Gubamint spending went thru the roof, taxes went thru the roof, and wealth plummeted. This increased taxation and lowering the standard of living thru inflation, induced women to leave the home in droves to maintain a standard of living.

(D) Affirmative Action was passed as remedial for the discrimination against black. The woman’s lib, which wanted to be womyn’s lib, “horned in” on Affirmative Action. That diluted the effectiveness of the government’s program for blacks and institutionalize the “ima victim” mentality. Womyn became prized in the corporate world where one had to deliver numbers. This drove up the wages paid women and allowed them to leave the home and earn, in some cases, far better money than their spouse. There goes another nail in the coffin containing the notion of a nuclear family.

SOOOOOOO

What the caller was TRYING to say was the gubamint, either deliberately or unintendedly, destroyed the american family by:

(1) stripping the old folks away by social security thus empowering the gubamint to solve people’s problems;

(2) nuked the church as source of support and moral authority by the war on poverty and the liberalization of morality thus empowering the government by removing the church as an alternative and counter weight to gubamint;

(3) broke the economics of the family unit by throwing men out, making them worthless, and demeaning them in the eyes of their women thus empowering the gubamint to become the ersatz father to these women and children;

(4) put everyone, by inflation and higher taxes, on a gerbil wheel to try to maintain the same standard of living thus empowering the gubamint with more money to spend;

(5) using affirmative action to increase artificially increase the value of women in the marketplace thus empowering the gubamint to “protect” women from “discrimination” and putting gubamint in the role of “child care”;

(6) using affirmative action to create a permanent culture of race sex “discrimination” empowering the gubamint to be the arbiter of “fairness”.

I think that is what the caller was trying to get out.

Gubamint bad! And, while there may be no going back without a bloody revolution, these problems need to be addressed.