From: hasn@midway.uchicago.edu (Sheheryar Hasnain)
Subject: Re: The PC Issue
Organization: University of Chicago
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 1992 22:16:28 GMT

In article <1992Jul30.151623.1@eagle.wesleyan.edu>, mzener@eagle.wesleyan.edu writes:
> 
>    Drugs:  They provide glamour, instant money, big thrills, and promises of
> power.  Instead it spawns crippling addiction and street warfare, hindering
> people who would have succeeded on their own by killing them, seducing them, or
> making their life so hazardous that their energies are not focused on bettering
> their circumstance but simply staying alive.

S:  I have no idea about what point you're trying to make here.  Demand and
Supply my friend.  There is a demand.  A huge demand.  Enough to make plenty
of money for the druglords (which I may add are not inner city drug dealers
but probably more influential folk).  Why does this demand exist?  Because
a lot of people want to escape their situations.  Situations they did not
choose to be in.  And they don't even have the priviledge of getting educated
enough to walk out of it.  Yes people want instantly to forget who and where
they are. And what promises of power do drugs make?  Maybe you've seen 
New Jack City and the like a few too many times.(did you know that in an
unofficial count there are more white drug dealers in the US even though
the proportion in jail is by and large black and hispanic!!) 

>    The current welfare system:  The simplistic arguement works best.  If you
> provide an economic incentive to be unemployed, there will be more unemployed. 
> If you create a fund that will provide a can of seeds per week to every bord
> that asks, no matter what, you breed more birds;  

S:  Hey let there be more birds.  There is plenty of seed to go around.  And 
thats the truth.  The US produces more than enough food to feed every single
person.  We have the resources my friend.  Only too few have too much and too
many have too little.


  if you automatically provide
> money and food stamps for every child bornout of wedlock but into poverty, you
> get more poor single-parented children.  This seems cruel but it is true.  A
> welfare reform is needed that provides incentives to learn skills and find
> jobs, that will support someone's first Big Mistake (the aforementioned child),
> but requires that they learn from that mistake by _not_ supporting their
> second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth pregnacies (yes, of course we should pay
> for children that already were born under the old system, just not _new_ second
> children).  There won't be babies thrown out of windows or tossed into the
> garbage -- or should I say" no _more_," as it happens now in hardly
> insignificant numbers.  There will be fewer poor children BORN, which will
> enable those families to better provide for themselves and their offspring.

Let me guess who your single greatest infleunce was:  Dan Quayle, no Bush.
In all seriousness you're talking as though a person who was merely born
into a rich family has the right of having as many children wereas for
Less fortunate it is a "big mistake" .  Like I said earlier, kids are great.
We should have a trust fund for every child born.  That way people will
have more kids.  There is plenty of food to go around.  It would be better
than dumping it in oceans or in cafeteria garbages which our system promotes.
And whats wrong with single parented children?  Marriages are part of the 
whole system?  They are contracts between the two parties and the state.
Whats so sacred about an institution that can be broken if the state decides
the union of the two parties is unwanted.  I don't see your point.
What you say has the old scary "Norplant" implications:  the poor should'nt 
have kids.  Comeon. Give me a break.
,
> 
>    We got that push becuase when our ancestors came over from another country,
> they had to either work very hard or starve.  They worked, and instilled in
> their children the value of work.  With that work ethic and with the bettered
> circumstance, the children too could succeed, and thus was the cycle started. 
> We _can't_ give the push to someone else, they must make it on their own or it
> is not lasting.  We must _let_ them make that push by not giving them a way
> out;  our policy must be to help those who try to help themsleves.

S:  But it does not have to be that way.  And there is no guarantee that
hard work will pay off.  Let build a system where we dont have to leave our
future to economic conditions,  chance, gender and subjective biases.
> 

> 
>