Our Ship Of State

In his 1935 State of the Union message, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said the following:

The lessons of history, confirmed by evidence immediately before me, show conclusively that continued dependence on relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit. It is inimical to the dictates of sound policy. It is a violation of the traditions of America.

Ironically, it was this message that Franklin used to introduce his legislation for the Social Security Act, unemployment insurance and Aid to Dependent Children programs.

Under both Democrat and Republican Democrats administrations, social entitlement programs have destroyed the traditional American family and replaced it with a ravenous impostor, a morally and spiritually dead entity that consumes and demands ever more resources and yet produces nothing but crime and poverty.

And if it wasn't so incredibly short-sighted and just flat out wrong, what follows would be hilarious. This is what FDR penned upon signing this legislation on August 14, 1935:

This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy.

This pandering former NYS Governor was old, infirm and completely unaware of the consequences of his actions.

Or perhaps not.


It is still undecided as to whether or not the war preparations of the Imperial Japanese Navy, reported to us by the British Royal Navy and deciphered by the Magic program, were deliberately kept secret from Adr. Kimmel by Roosevelt in order to propel us into WWII. In any event, FDR's incompetence prolonged the Great Depression by almost ten years and killed over 2,200 sailors at Pearl Harbor. And now we are again paying the price, this time for his politically motivated domestic policies.

And I fear we are beyond the tipping point. Don't bother reversing engines or moving the deck chairs; the Ship of State is sliding into the cold, wet abyss of moral rot, decay and financial ruin. Our current, ill-conceived welfare system has destroyed our culture through:

1) Dependency - Nearly half the nation is receiving some form of government assistance.
2) Poverty - Poverty and dependency are merely sides of the same coin. Despite trillions of dollars expended, national poverty levels have remained virtually unchanged since the War on Poverty began in 1965. In 1966 the US population was 193,388,000 of whom 28,510,000 were at or below poverty levels for a poverty rate of 14.7%. In 2010 there were 305,688,000 Americans of whom 46,179,000 were at or below poverty levels for a rate of 15.1%. Does this sound like a plan or what?
3) Births Out Of Wedlock - The national rate is 51 births per 1,000 women, it has risen 16% in ten years; for Hispanic woman it is more than double at 106 births per 1,000, blacks are 72 births per 1,000 and whites are 32 per 1,000. Over a third of all new births are now out of wedlock. Couple this with a precipitious drop in the overall birth rate - there are fewer babies and fewer fathers willing to care for a family. Perhaps no other indicator other than high school drop outs is more accurate as a harbinger of poverty than this one - a single mom.
4) Nonemployment - Not only unemployment where a person is seeking employment; nonemployment is the percent of the civilian noninstitutional population age 16 to 65 that is not employed. National nonemployment is estimated at 29% and as high as 51% in Washington, D.C.
5) Abortion - Abortion rates are highest among poor blacks. In NYC recently an anti-abortion ad was pulled down because of fear of reprisals because it stated that the most dangerous place for an Afro-American child is in the womb. There are almost 1.4 million abortions a year in the US. About 60% of them are performed on white women but black women are three times as likely as whites to have an abortion.
6) Violent Crime  - Violent crimes trends are the lowest they have been in decades, a 65% decrease from 47.7 violent crimes committed per 1,000 population in 1973 to 16.9 in 2010. The experts are still arguing over the reasons for this for it flies in the face of conventional wisdom.

In the words of Ben Franklin:

Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

And it is only through God that we may become virtuous and deserving of freedom. Our Nation forgets this only at great peril.