Letter | America’s ‘good intentions’ destroying the black family

Devastating collateral damage, often resulting from well-meaning undertakings, is something that liberals customarily discount, confirming once again the ageless adage, “Hell is paved with good intentions.”

Thomas Sowell, senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, was born of a black family in North Carolina and raised in Harlem, N.Y. He served as a Marine in Korea, holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a Ph.D from Chicago University. He is an economist, political philosopher and author. In an essay published in January, he made the following statements: “There is no question that liberals do an impressive job of expressing concern for blacks. But do the intentions expressed in their words match the actual consequences of their deeds [?] …The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of liberal’s expansion of the welfare state… In all cases, and many others, liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake.”

Walter E. Williams, of George Mason University, a Ph.D economist and author, grew up a child of a broken home out of a black neighborhood in Philadelphia. He wrote: “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do, and that is destroy the black family.”

Liberal policies have emasculated many black males, depriving them of the dignity and self-respect that hard work and responsibility engender, turning much of the black community into a matriarchal society ever increasingly dependent on government handouts.

The black community isn’t the only beneficiary of well-intentioned but destructive liberal policies. The family unit itself, irrespective of race, is facing direct assault. Liberal governments have decided that parents are no longer capable of deciding what is in their children’s best interest. At the request of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, asylum was denied to a German family that fled its homeland and government penalties including child abduction because they homeschooled their children. Furthermore, Attorney General Eric Holder is now seeking to block a Louisiana private school voucher law that will benefit the underprivileged. President Obama’s 2014 Budget Request for the Department of Education terminates the successful D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program which provided vouchers to low-income children to attend private schools of choice.

Liberals are incapable of providing a rational explanation for an ideology that denies the essence of the basic human aspiration for self-determination and freedom from the encumbrances that central government imposes. Like frustrated and intemperate children, they respond to criticism as children do, by calling their critics names, such as bigots, homophobes, racists. They lack the ability to consider any other rationale for existence other than their own importance. Driven by a subconscious feeling of inadequacy, they compensate by projecting onto others a need for their guidance and benevolence. They compulsively envision themselves as the only ones wise and competent enough to save those that they perceives to be life’s losers due to its inexplicable unfairness and to rescue them from those whose greed will lead them to material privation.

Liberals are therefore committed to redistribution of wealth, to transfer the fruits of another’s labor to those who labor not, to rescue an age-old planet from an impending disaster that they claim is the result of man-made ingenuity and exploitation, and to control all means of production that assuage man’s basic needs.

It is inexplicable to me that the implausible basis for liberalism, that individualism leads to greed and the exploitation of others, that the common good can only be obtained and sustained by subjugating to the state the individual’s drive for self expression and achievement, could be supported by otherwise intelligent human beings.

The writer lives in Carolina Shores, N.C.

This story was originally published October 14, 2013 at 12:41 PM with the headline "Letter | America’s ‘good intentions’ destroying the black family ."