For some reason, I got to thinking back to a discussion about whether it was appropriate for aid agencies to teach budgeting, menu planning, and other skills to families applying for aid. The more I think about it, the more I realize it is not only appropriate, it is in some cases absolutely NECESSARY.
No, I'm not watering down my libertarian philosophy and advocating for a nanny state. I am simply stating a matter of fact, gleaned from personal experience.
See, I come from a world with which I think it is fair to say very few of you are familiar. I have mentioned before that I am the only person I know (besides one younger brother) whose parents fought a custody battle NOT to have custody. When one parent had custody, I was simply warehoused until they could pass my upbringing on to someone else. I spent half of my formative years in foster care, and, in fact "aged out" of foster care.
Until I was 16, my "budgeting" skills were limited to turning over all of my earnings to my stepmother, who would put it in a jar, and use it as her personal "slush" fund while forcing me to beg for five bucks here and there. When I was 16 and in foster care, I was taken to open a checking account, but wasn'yt given the skills to manage it. Certain hygiene skills such as shaving I had to figure out by myself; I simply had noone to teach me (thank GOD we live in the era of the disposable safety razor, or you all might be calling me "scarface".
If you think my situation is unique, think again. There are over 580,000 children in US foster care, and the government is putting financial pressure on the states to seize MORE of these children. Only 44% of these children will ever see their biological parents again (despite the fact that 97% have never been criminally charged with abuse or neglect, but I've already written on that multiple times). I believe very firmly that if the government sees it appropriate to take upon themselves the care and nurturing of these children, the government needs to be fully responsible for their upbringing. Failing to do so condemns the majority of children to a life of poverty, frustration, and all too often crime and suicide.
Now, of course, the government shouldn't be in the child rearing business. They really shouldn't be in the child seizing business. The handling of displaced children should be handled by private groups within the community (possibly, in the case of crime related seizures, with some compensation from the justice system). And those groups should accept FULL responsibility for the raising of these children, including teaching them life skills.
But it doesn't end there. I believe the single largest contributing factor to generational poverty is that we have an entire class of people who have never been taught what they must do to pull themselves out of poverty. And we've tried to treat the problem superficially, without considering that the deficiencies of one generation are all too often passed onto the next. One example would be in the slaves we freed from the south. We freed them from a life where they never HAD to make these decisions for themselves, without teaching them HOW to make these decisions for themselves. While an increasing number of determined descendants of slaves have taken self education upon themselves to pull themselves out of poverty, it seems that there are countless numbers among them who have not. They have accepted the easy answers from "leaders" like Farrakhan, Sharpton, and Jackson, and have simply accepted a society that has allowed its collective guilt to lure it into throwing more and more money at the problem. The result is an underclass that is in grave danger of becoming a PERMANENT underclass.
When I worked on an advisory board for our community's Second Harvest in Wisconsin, for instance, we discussed the fact that too often we would give food to the hungry who had no idea how to cook it. The solution we arrived at was to set up a kitchen at the warehouse so we could use it for exactly that purpose, and to teach the food banks in our area how to pass those skills on to those they were assisting. That is a process that requires a TIME, rather than a money, commitment.
We DO need to get past our insistence on dependence on the government. But we can only do so if we take the time to teach the skills that will allow such independence to be possible. Such an approach necessarily requires un-learning some hundred plus years of backwards thinking and actual involvement in the community, but I have little doubt that if a workable to helping the poor achieve self sufficiency can be done, this is the best country to do it.