i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about this?

[flintlock]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

The government's war on poverty fixed everything, didn't it?

This reminds me of how our government tries to "fix" poverty. They keep making 'em faster than the government can fix them.

[media][/media]

[Serge_Tomiko]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

By the way, since I grew up in Chicago and still have family there, I know where Humboldt Park area is, referenced in the article. It's a minority area. That kid in the article started out with 2 1/2 strikes against him. Very young parents who made bad life choices so that father was in jail, lived in a dangerous, poor part of the city surrounded by gangs, and he's a minority.

Humboldt Park is not THAT bad. Sure, it is not the best neighborhood... but even 10 years ago when I lived in Chicago during college, it was better by far than most of the South Side.

[Judas]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

Here's an except from one of Sowell's speechs on academic achievement under segregation v. now...

Just as importantly, as in the Wiki article I posted:

"Long-standing trend of black progress. Sowell also challenges the notion that black progress is due to 'progressive' government programs or policies. In The Economics and Politics of Race, (1983), Ethnic America (1981), Affirmative Action (2004) and other books for example, Sowell shows that in the 5 years prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, black gains in employment and education were actually higher than in the 5 years after...

Objective data challenges both sides of the political spectrum. This history of achievement is too often lost and overlooked Sowell holds, and contradicts some right-wing claims that blacks have not pulled themselves up, or that seek to tar black progress as a function of affirmative action. The same history also contradicts some liberal claims that government programs like race quotas are responsible for black progress, when the facts show a long-standing trend of black advance before such programs."

Some people don't seem to get this- it isn't about politics. They hear what they believe to be something against "Their Guys" and the spittle starts dribbling and they start babbling about dinosaurs and sharks.

[allenjs]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

with all due respect, WAKE UP!

modernism -> moral relativism -> secularism - legal positivism driven by social pseudo science - why are you surprised?

...

The secularist anti-theist have gained control over the public education system, starting at the highest university levels. There's TRUTH (which we are lacking), and then there is sentimental tripe and sophistry based on NOTHING, but taught from on high.

Right on. Progress needs to be anchored to some sort of fundamental, unassailable values that are shared by society (whether these be theist or not). If there is no foundational anchor, then people start measuring "progress" in terms of deviance from the present.

Deconstructionism (now, thankfully, dead in academia, but clinging to life with some administration officials who went through academia in the 1990s) is the culmination of this relativist philosophy that abolishes all anchors.

[santafe2]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

I haven't forgotten about slavery or Jim Crow. It isn't about politics. I'm not dumb. I wouldn't like to "role" back the Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Act.

If you want to discuss the community cohesion, crime, single parent households, etc. of minority communities earlier in the 20th century as compared to after the rise of the welfare state, government housing projects, etc. which came later I'd be happy to oblige. If you're going to ask stupid loaded questions, imply I'm racist, insinuate I'm intellectually lacking, etc. then I have little to say to you.

EDIT: Actually, if you truly are interested in something more than an internet insult-fest a good place to start is with the works of Thomas Sowell.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell

I apologize if my criticism came off as a personal attack. But if you stand by your statement that, "The destruction of the black family and community can mostly be traced back to the "war on poverty" and misguided government attempts to centrally plan outcome.", we have no common ground on which to begin a discussion. And yes, I find that to be a completely dumb and politically motivated statement.

Sowell is a fairly typical uber-conservative that hates central planning unless it's the kind of central planning he wants like immigration control.

I'll yield the closing statement on this subject to you.

[Master Shake]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

Just as importantly, as in the Wiki article I posted:

"Long-standing trend of black progress. Sowell also challenges the notion that black progress is due to 'progressive' government programs or policies. In The Economics and Politics of Race, (1983), Ethnic America (1981), Affirmative Action (2004) and other books for example, Sowell shows that in the 5 years prior to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, black gains in employment and education were actually higher than in the 5 years after...

Objective data challenges both sides of the political spectrum. This history of achievement is too often lost and overlooked Sowell holds, and contradicts some right-wing claims that blacks have not pulled themselves up, or that seek to tar black progress as a function of affirmative action. The same history also contradicts some liberal claims that government programs like race quotas are responsible for black progress, when the facts show a long-standing trend of black advance before such programs."

Some people don't seem to get this- it isn't about politics. They hear what they believe to be something against "Their Guys" and the spittle starts dribbling and they start babbling about dinosaurs and sharks.

If you haven't already read it, I highly recommended Myron Magnet's The Dream and The Nightmare: the Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass. The basic thesis is that, just when real barriers to black American's progress were being torn down, they were derailed by the sexual revolution and general decline of social and cultural standards. I think the analysis is spot on.

Review

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...5/ai_13192477/

[Munger]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

The black community was much healthier and more vibrant under Jim Crow than after The Great Society. That fact does not mean that one pines for a return to segregation, only that the great liberal social experiments of the past 4-5 decades were dismal failures, unless you judge them by the percentage of people dependent on government or the emergence of an entitlement/grievance mentality.

Here's an except from one of Sowell's speechs on academic achievement under segregation v. now.

Back in 1899, when the schools of Washington, D.C. were racially segregated and discrimination was rampant, there were four academic high schools in the city-- three white and one black. When standardized tests were given that year, the black academic high school scored higher than two of the three white academic high schools.⁶ Today, exactly a century later, even setting such a goal would be considered hopelessly utopian. Nor was this a fluke. That same high school was scoring at or above the national average on IQ tests during the 1930s and 1940s.⁷ Yet its physical plant was inadequate and its average class size was higher than that in the city's white high schools.

Today, that same school has a much better physical plant and per-pupil expenditures in the District of Columbia are among the highest in the nation. But the students' test scores are among the lowest. Nor was this school unique in having had higher academic achievements during a period when it seemingly lacked the prerequisites of achievement and yet fell far behind in a later period when these supposed prerequisites were more plentiful.

This is obviously not an argument for segregation and discrimination, nor does it deny that counter-examples might be found of schools that languished in the first period and did better in the second. The point here is much more specific-- that resources have had little or nothing to do with educational quality. Numerous studies of schools in general have shown that, both within the United States and in international comparisons. It should be no surprise that the same applies to black schools.

http://www.tsowell.com/spracecu.html

Perhaps all schools would have higher test results and IQ scores if we only allowed a small percentage of the most apt children to enroll. Good solution.

[Judas]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

I apologize if my criticism came off as a personal attack. But if you stand by your statement that, "The destruction of the black family and community can mostly be traced back to the "war on poverty" and misguided government attempts to centrally plan outcome.", we have no common ground on which to begin a discussion. And yes, I find that to be a completely dumb and politically motivated statement.

That's quite alright, and I apologize for my tone.

However I do stand by my criticism that the "war on poverty" (coupled with the "war on drugs" and it's peculiar application) had numerous consequences which did damage to minority communities, and that the pervasive social problems associated with government housing, drugs, gangs, etc. are largely a product of the mistakes made and unexpected outcomes of these public policies.

As far as "conservative" goes, I am FAR from "conservative" in the modern sense.

[Munger]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

The government's war on poverty fixed everything, didn't it?

I didn't see anyone arguing that the war on poverty fixed everything. I did see it asserted that the war on poverty caused these problems. Such an assertion bears the burden of proof.

[Master Shake]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

Perhaps all schools would have higher test results and IQ scores if we only allowed a small percentage of the most apt children to enroll. Good solution.

Good non-sequiteur.

[allenjs]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

I would be embarrassed, shamed to admit I knew someone special who was in distress and I did nothing for them. Yet he writes about it as if his writing has value unto itself. His words only serve to carve his shame in stone.

You have a point there. Perhaps the author figured it would turn out OK, because:

We all start out good. That smart kid who had seen too much at the age of 8 is now a smart young man who was in a bad situation and made bad choices.

Today at Buchenwald, Obama explained that human nature is only about 49% evil and 51% good. Eli Weisel quoted "Tommy Wolf" as saying that, "on the whole, there is more to love about mankind than to denigrate".

This brilliant innovation of moral philosophy tells us that we can count on the basic goodness of human nature, so long as "situations" don't mess it up. Just think, if we had known this earlier, we could have saved so much on prisons and lawyers! We could have avoided all those wars!

Rather than assuming that children will turn out depraved in absence of strong upbringing, we can assume that children will basically turn out full of goodness and wholesomeness. At most, a parent needs to "be there".

[santafe2]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

I didn't see anyone arguing that the war on poverty fixed everything. I did see it asserted that the war on poverty caused these problems. Such an assertion bears the burden of proof.

Thanks, you made my point much more clearly than I have.

[charliebrown]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

not just you master shake, but all of these arguments about policy good, policy bad, etc. etc. These kids need a family and they need love!
That's my point no beuracracy can give that.

Going through the adoption, and foster child wringer I see what happens to kids. No parents, absent parents, parents on drugs, kid shuffled off to a new home with new parents every year or two. My adopted son came from a "state run home" yeah they feed you, they cloth you, change your diaper but they don't love you its just a job. The workers are over-burdened with 12 kids each. Just making the feeding, changing rounds keeps them busy. I have seen what happens to infants in these homes. I heard stories about kids needing love to grow and its true. Infants who aren't held, who aren't talked to etc, stop eating, don't sleep well, a lot of them get sick and die. Not because they are abused, not fed etc. They almost choose not to go on. One parent I know personally flew down to the orhpange, 6 months early because her adopted but not finalized daughter started waisting away. She took the kid out of the home and fostered it while waitinfg for the adoption to finalize. The daugher was thriving a few weeks later.

Once again I don't know what the state solution is to kids whoose parents choose not to be parents, or meet an untimely end. We need to convince parents of their noble responsiblity of being parents. This has to start at a grass roots level. A pamphlet from the Gvt isn't going to do it.
We need a societal thinking shift. Mabye the economy going down in flames is going to get people to wake up and re-evaluate their priorites.
I'm a big fan of a stay at home parent. Maybe if we got a real tax break for what it really costs to raise a kid that might solve the suburban absentee parent problem. Many homes need both parents working.


Even in blue sky suburbia, the people across the street from me are adding on a 1500 Sq Ft. addition to their 1500 Sq ft house. They just popped a kid with another on the way. They are not rich, now there just in debt. Don't they realize they are going to have scrape and toil and work to pay for that thing, it will be long hours and work on the weekend. I'll probably be entertaining another kid with absentee parents 5 years from now.

I already did this with our other neighbor's kid 10 years ago. Its ok i dont mind, I kind of like being the cool dad with the rusty car who takes the neighbor kids out for ice cream and let them eat it in car. Better not tell big brother I dont have car seats for them all. . It is only half a mile under 20 mph to the ice cream shop.

[Munger]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

Good non-sequiteur.

Sorry - didn't realize I needed to connect all the dots for you.

There was a significant disparity in the number of white kids and black kids attending schools in the 1890s. Before we can examine whether Sowell's data has any meaning for the proposition for which he asserts it, we need to know the percentage of the white and black populations enrolled in school. We also need to know the criteria underlying whether a child is enrolled or not (I am going to assume, for illustrative purposes, that the most able kids tend to be the ones enrolled in school - and while this is not necessarily true, it is at least somewhat likely based on parental occupation/education etc).

Let's say you have two populations, population A and population B, each with 1000 kids. Each population has an average IQ of 100 and exhibits a normal distribution.

If population A enrolls the brightest 80% of its kids in school and population B enrolls the brightest 30% of its kids in school, which school going exhibit a higher average IQ?

[Master Shake]

Re: i'm a libertarian end all, but i'm wondering tonight, what's the free market going to do about t

Thanks, you made my point much more clearly than I have.

Really? You don't think welfare made fathers optional? You don't think the Great Society created an entitlement mentality? The Section 8 program didn't destroy neighborhoods?