A NORTH AMERICAN TRAGEDY
It’s not bad enough that the liberal agenda of tax and spend is ruining the economy, it is also ruining the people. No better example of this can be found than on our Native American reservations where welfare has been going on for 150 years. These people have been subsidized for six generations. Crime rates on many reservations are twenty times the national average. Alcoholism runs as high as 90%. Heroin, amphetamines and cocaine are a huge presence.
At one Minnesota reservation mothers tell their daughters to expect to be raped and to keep quiet about it. At South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation, population 40,000, there are 3,000 child abuse cases each year. In addition there are 20,000 arrests each year, one for every other person. A tribal officer reports, “We pick up a guy for some alcohol-related offense and are out of town for an hour taking them to jail, and in the meantime people are here clubbing and stabbing each other.”
Indians were once the most self-sufficient people on earth. For thousands of years they experienced none of the behavioral pathologies present on today’s reservations. What changed them? The government began to support them. They no longer had to make their own way. Idleness and boredom were powerful incentives to mischief. If our government had never given them a penny they would have left the reservations behind and been fully integrated in our society often reaching the upper levels of achievement.
The same thing that renders Native Americans unemployable and helpless is afflicting growing numbers of Blacks, Whites, Asians, and Hispanics. If you care about people don’t give them money they didn’t earn. It does not rescue them from poverty, it enhances dependence and encourages dysfunction. It is the most destructive social force on earth.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the harm that welfare does the liberals and socialists refuse to acknowledge this damage and resist curbing subsidies. Rather, they insist on giving more money to the underclass. This resistance to self-evident facts places them in the same category as religious fanatics. Sometimes it seems easier for a Muslim terrorist to leave his religion than a liberal to see the obvious mess they are making of our country.
