ESR | September 5, 2005 | America as a Third World nation

America as a Third World nation



By Alan Caruba

web posted September 5, 2005



The haunting images of New Orleans were those of a Third

World nation unable to cope with a natural disaster. The over-

riding question in the first days following the hurricane was "What

is the government doing?"



Americans have been conditioned to look to the federal

government as the answer to all their needs. The federal

government has steadily taken over our education and health

care systems through vast programs that, in the former case, has

ruined what was once one of the best in the world and, in the

latter case, through Medicare and Medicaid, exercises control

over the way the system works and who it benefits. Social

Security has, for too many, replaced planning and saving for

one's old age.



When a portion of everything you earn is removed from your

paycheck in order to pay for someone else's senior years, how

can you be expected to put aside money you don't have to save,

invest or spend as you wish? We have been required to turn

personal responsibility for our lives over to "the government." It

sounds good on paper, but the reality is that Social Security is

going broke and the interest level in the current administration's

effort to "fix" the system is so low the President's efforts have

been met with a significant measure of indifference.



The "government's" response to the disaster that befell huge

swaths of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama suggests that

there are, indeed, limits to what it can do. It is, after all,

composed of bureaucrats who must obey the thousands of

regulations and laws affecting their agencies and that have been

imposed on our national economy, affecting all the rest of us.



One of the first actions "the government" took was the

Environmental Protection Agency announcement that it was

suspending the idiotic mandates requiring countless different

formulations of gasoline to insure that a sufficient supply was

available nationwide. In one state after another, these mandates

insure that different formulations are required in different areas of

the same state.



Mandating the use of ethanol in order to insure a bounty of riches

for corn producers while ignoring the need to drill for oil in

Alaska or ignoring enormous off-short reserves and shale oil

exposes the politics that over-rode the need for greater energy

self-sufficiency and independence from a Middle East that largely

hates America.



The looting and criminality that occurred in New Orleans also

revealed the failure of not just local people, but much of the

black community in America to take advantage of the

protections and opportunities afforded by the Civil Rights and

Voting Rights legislation enacted since the 1960s. As

Washington Post columnist, Eugene Robinson, pointed out on

September 2nd, "New Orleans is two cities, not one, according

to census data---a relatively affluent, small, achingly lovely city

that's mostly white, and a poor, big, unlovely city that's almost all

black. Overall, the city is two-thirds African American; it ranks

as the ninth-poorest big city in the nation. It is also one of the

most violent cities in the country, now making a bid to reclaim

the ‘murder capitol' designation it held for many years."



This is repeated over and over again in many of the nation's

cities, many of whom are also falling prey to the influx of millions

of illegal aliens flooding across our southern border, bringing with

them crime and disease, replacing native-born American

workers for those jobs they might have had were it not for the

low wages the illegals will accept.



The laws fashioned to protect and help blacks have brought

about some improvements. A black middle class has emerged,

but the evidence demonstrates that too many black Americans

opted to remain mired in their own failure to take advantage of

educational opportunities, continued to produce the one-parent

families in which men were largely absent, and remained

responsible for much of the crime in the cities. In return, they

offered America a "gangsta rap" and "hip-hop" culture that

reflects attitudes immune to the values shared by the majority of

Americans. They were not marginalized. They marginalized

themselves.



The physical losses in the affected areas will be rebuilt.

Americans always rebuild after natural disasters, but the social

problems are likely to remain unless and until we begin to shut

our borders against what can only be called an invasion and until

black Americans fully integrate themselves by taking more

responsibility for their lives.



We all need to rely less on the "government", but it seems

unlikely at this point the government will allow that to occur.

Congress is too in love with the billions it can seize for countless

pork barrel projects "for the folks back home" and to insure

reelection. There are too many people dependent on the socialist

programs enacted after WWII. The mindless federal spending

has been reflected at the state level while, at the same time,

federal mandates have eroded state and local power.



We need to vastly reduce the vast matrix of economic

regulations that suck billions out of the economy while creating

obstacles to free market answers to our most pressing needs

and, as in the recent Supreme Court ruling, destroy private

property values with a ferocity matched only by natural disasters.



Life in America is going to get more expensive because "the

government" claimed it could take care of us from birth to death.

It can't. It never could.



Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs", posted

on the Internet website of The National Anxiety Center,

www.anxietycenter.com. © Alan Caruba, September 2005



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