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Nov. 20, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:46
915 Drugging Children

A drug that reduces the intelligence of hundreds of millions of children...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing well. Thank you so much to all the kind emails and comments that I received, or the video Standing in Blood, the latest from Iraq received.
Please continue to send that around if you can.
I think it's quite important for people to see on both sides of the fence.
So, I'd like to talk to you today about drugs and compassion.
Now, compassion is a rather abused term in political or social discourse, so I'd like to put forward the results of a certain kind of drug Which regularly tyrannizes the lives of children.
And I'm going to ask you, based on the results of the application of that drug, I'm going to ask you to mull over in your mind what it would mean to have compassion in this kind of situation.
So, the drug produces in general about a 20% reduction in the cognitive abilities of children.
It retards their cognitive development, in particular, their verbal development.
It ends up, statistically, they end up, of course, because of the resulting loss of cognitive abilities or retardation of cognitive abilities with lower educational attainments and with lower job attainments.
They have significantly increased behavioral and emotional problems, these poor children.
They have lower impulse control.
Retarded social development, they tend to engage in sexual activity much earlier and they tend to have more illegitimate children as a result of the application of this drug.
And there are significantly increased tendencies to either end up on welfare or to end up in jail or to be a criminal.
So these are just some of the measurable and objective results of the application.
of this drug. And no, it's not Ritalin, although I'm sure you could do some fine, fine work on getting the perils of Ritalin out there.
But this drug is the welfare state.
In other words, the drug is violence or coercion, the coercion or violence of the welfare state itself.
So I'm going to read a little bit, since you all like the facts, I'm going to read a little bit from some of the studies that are put forward about the deleterious effects of the welfare state on children So that you can understand that libertarians are not lacking in compassion.
What we are not is sentimental and what we are not is stupid.
So it is not out of a lack of compassion, particularly for children, That libertarians and anarchists advocate the end of the welfare state.
It's not because we love the idea of children working in factories and a dog-eat-dog capitalist pecking order where the rich wear top hats and walk on the necks of the poor.
It is because we care.
We care about children.
So let's have a look at, this is a bit of an older article, but the statistics are solid, solid.
This is How Welfare Harms Kids, and it was published in June 5th, 1996, so a little bit, I guess almost a little over 10 years ago now, but it's not like things have gotten better since then.
And it goes something like this.
The Stanford Children Rally, held in Washington on June 1st, This must be in 1996, called attention to the plight of the nation's children.
However, the unstated underlying goal was to defend the continuing growth of the welfare system and implicitly criticize those in Congress who have sought to reform it.
Thus, while the Stand for Children event properly called attention to the disastrous condition of America's children, It is important to recognize that children are suffering precisely because of the government policies supported over the last 25 years by the leading organizations promoting the rally.
The simple fact is that children are suffering because the U.S. welfare system has failed.
I'm going to editorialize as we go along here so I don't have to remember everything at the end.
Children are suffering because violence is evil.
Children are not suffering because the welfare state failed.
That's like saying Jews suffered because Nazism failed.
No. Jews suffered because Nazism succeeded and it's evil.
The welfare state causes children to suffer because it is evil to point guns at people, take their money, and give it to other people.
It's evil for you. It's evil for me.
It's evil for every asshole bureaucrat in the world and every politician pontificating in front of a microphone.
But more of that later.
Designed as a system to help children, bullshit, it has ended up damaging and abusing the very children it was intended to save.
The welfare system has failed because the ideas upon which it was founded are flawed.
Not true. The morality was evil.
The current system is based upon the assumption that higher welfare benefits and increased expanded welfare eligibility are good for children.
According to this theory, welfare reduces poverty and so will increase children's lifetime well-being and attainment.
This This is untrue.
Higher welfare payments do not help children.
They increase dependence and illegitimacy, which have a devastating effect on children's development.
Americans often are told that the current welfare system does not promote long-term dependence.
This also is untrue.
The 4.7 million families currently receiving aid to families with dependent children already have spent an average six and a half years on welfare.
When past and estimated future receipts of AFDC are combined, the estimated average length of stay on AFDC among those families currently receiving benefits is 13 years.
Average. Among the 4.7 million families in 1996 receiving AFDC, over 90% will spend over two years on the AFDC caseload.
More than 75% will spend over five years on AFDC. It is welfare dependence, not poverty, that has the most negative effect on children.
It is welfare dependence, not poverty, that has the most negative effects on children.
Recent research by the Congressional Budget Office Director June O'Neill shows that increasing the length of time a child spends on welfare may reduce the child's IQ by as much as 20%.
Welfare dependency as a child has a negative effect on the earnings and employment capacity of young men.
The more welfare income received by a boy's family during his childhood, the lower the boy's earnings will be as an adult, even when compared to boys in families with identical non-welfare income.
If the parent just has a job, strangely enough, the children grow up to want jobs.
Welfare also plays a powerful role in promoting illegitimacy.
Research by CBO Director O'Neill also shows, for example, that a 50% increase in monthly AFDC and food stamp benefit levels will cause a 43% increase in the number of illegitimate births within a state.
Illegitimacy, in turn, has an enormous negative effect on children's development and on their behavior as adults.
Being born outside of marriage and raised in single-parent homes, colon, almost always triples the level of behavioral and emotional problems among children.
Nearly triples the level of teen sexual activity, doubles the probability a young woman will have a child out of wedlock, and doubles the probability a boy will become a threat to society, engage in criminal activity, and wind up in jail.
Overall, welfare operates as a form of social toxin.
The more of this toxin received by a child's family, the less successful the child will be as an adult.
If America's children are to be saved, the current welfare system must be replaced.
No, the concentration camps don't need to be replaced.
They need to be abolished.
A stone evil.
I'm going to...
The automatic and rapid growth of welfare spending must be...
There's a bunch of nonsensical policy recommendations here, so let's have a look at...
The failed liberal paradigm, socialist paradigm.
The socialist welfare state is founded on faulty logic.
This flawed logic embedded in nearly all liberal thinking about welfare runs something like this.
Premise one. Children and families with higher incomes seem to do better in life.
Premise two. Welfare can easily raise family income.
Conclusion. Welfare is good for kids.
Without morality, you end up with this bizarre cause-and-effect reversal utilitarianism.
From this logic has sprung a relentless 30-year effort to raise welfare benefits, expand welfare eligibility, create new welfare programs, and increase welfare spending.
The recent reform legislation passed by Congress sought to slow the automatic growth of welfare spending.
Thus, it violated the cardinal tenets of the liberal welfare system, leading to cries of alarm from the welfare establishment and a prompt veto by President Billy von Clinton.
In fact, each of the central tenets of modern welfare is misleading and deeply flawed.
Together they become a recipe for a disastrous system of aid which harms rather than helps.
Aggressively crushing the hopes and future of increasing numbers of young Americans, it is useful to examine each of these cardinal socialist tenets individually.
Claim 1. Raising incomes is crucial to the well-being and success of children.
The common liberal corollary to this premise is that poverty causes such problems as crime, school failure, low cognitive ability, illegitimacy, low work ethic and skills and drug use.
Hence reducing poverty through greater welfare spending will reduce most social problems.
History refutes this belief.
In 1950, nearly a third Of the US population was poor, twice the current rate in 1996.
In the 1920s, roughly half the population was poor by today's standards.
If the theory that poverty causes social problems were true, we should have had far more social problems in those earlier periods than we do today.
But crime and most other social problems have increased rather than fallen since these earlier periods.
History and common sense both show that values and abilities within families, not family income, lead to children's success.
Families with higher incomes tend to have sound values concerning self-control, deferred gratification, work, education, and marriage which they pass on to their children.
It is those values rather than the family income that are key to the children's attainment.
Attempting to raise the family income artificially through welfare is very unlikely to do much to benefit the child, but it is likely to destroy the very values that are the key to the child's success.
This kind of justification for violence through the reversal of cause and effect is constant.
Men tend to want to date young, attractive women.
So if we force men to date older unattractive women, those older unattractive women will become young and attractive.
Madness. But efficient madness for evil.
The truth about welfare. Sorry.
Claim 2. It is very easy to raise family income through welfare.
This is also untrue.
Because welfare reduces work effort and promotes illegitimacy in poverty-prone single-parent families, it actually may cause an overall decrease in family incomes.
Welfare is extremely efficient at replacing self-sufficiency with dependents, but relatively ineffective in raising incomes and eliminating poverty.
Claim 3. Higher welfare benefits and broadened eligibility will help children and improve their success later in life.
In certain limited cases, such as when it is needed to eliminate serious malnutrition, welfare can help.
That, of course, would be charity in a sane society.
But there is no evidence that enlarging benefits and expanding enrollments in most U.S. welfare programs will improve children's lives.
Claim 3. Higher welfare benefits and broadened eligibility will help children and improve their success.
Sorry about that. I've already read that one.
The truth about welfare. In contrast to the failed premises of welfare liberalism are the following hard facts about welfare and children.
Except in very limited cases, such as those involving serious malnutrition, welfare programs do not yield fewer problems and better life outcomes for children.
I mean, just by the by, when you understand morality and that violence is evil, you don't have to wait 30 years and crush two generations almost of children into a life of futility and semi-retardation in order to understand that this is going to occur.
Once you understand that violence is wrong, then you don't need to destroy the lives of tens of millions of children or around the world hundreds of millions of children and then go, oops.
Welfare programs intended to combat poverty do not help children but do increase welfare dependence, which in turn is very harmful to children's well-being.
Welfare programs intended to raise family incomes do not benefit children, but do significantly increase illegitimacy in single-parent families, which in turn have decisively negative effects on children's development.
Overall, the wider and more generous the welfare are, quote, safety net, safety news, the greater the problems of dependence and illegitimacy will become, and the greater the harm to children.
Examining welfare's impact on children.
Here we get into some stats.
The available scientific evidence clearly refutes the liberal hypothesis that attempting to raise family income through more generous welfare payments will benefit children.
For example, the average monthly value of welfare benefits and food stamps combined varies between states.
The conventional socialistic assumption is that children on welfare in states with lower benefit levels will be markedly worse off than children in states with higher benefit levels.
Children on AFDC in high benefit states, according to the theory, should have improved cognitive ability when compared to children without access to more generous welfare.
However, research published in 1994 by now Congressional Budget Office Director June O'Neill and Anne Hill of Queens College City University of New York demonstrates that this theory is incorrect.
O'Neill and Hill examined the IQs of young children who were long-term welfare recipients.
Having spent at least half of their lives on AFDC, contrary to the expected theory, they found that the higher welfare benefit did not improve children's cognitive performance.
The IQs of long-term welfare-dependent children in low-benefit states were not appreciably different from those in high-benefit states.
And we'll get to this compared to the average or to the non-welfare families in a moment.
Moreover, this picture is overly optimistic.
In restricting the sample to long-term dependent children, the analysis ignores the effects of higher welfare benefits in encouraging welfare enrollment and in lengthening the time spent on welfare.
O'Neill and Hill have shown that a 50% increase in monthly AFDC and food stamp benefit levels will lead to a 75% increase in the number of mothers with children enrolling in AFDC and a 75% increase in In the number of years spent on welfare, you get what you pay for.
Whatever you subsidize will increase, whatever you tax will diminish.
If you subsidize poverty, you simply buy more poverty.
If you tax jobs, you simply create or allow for the creation of fewer jobs.
This is Econ 101.
Once the effects of increased dependents are included, It becomes clear that the higher welfare benefits have a decisively negative effect on children.
Comparing children who were identical in social and economic factors such as race, family structure, mother's IQ in education, family income, and neighborhood residents, Hill and O'Neill found that the more years a child spent on welfare, the lower the child's IQ. The authors make it clear that it is not poverty but welfare itself which has a damaging effect on the child.
Examining the young children with average age of five and a half, the authors found that those who had spent at least two months of each year since birth on AFDC had cognitive abilities 20% below those who had received no welfare, even after holding family, income, race, parental IQ, and other variables constant.
I'm going to read that sentence again.
Examining the young children with an average age of five and a half, the authors found that those who had spent at least two months of each year since birth on AFDC had cognitive abilities 20% lower than those who had received no welfare, even after holding family, income, race, parental IQ, and other variables constant.
That's only two months a year.
Imagine what the cognitive deficit is for more welfare.
It is a toxin. O'Neill and Hill conclude, our findings of a negative impact of a welfare environment are particularly troubling.
After controlling for the effects of a rich array of characteristics, a mother's long-term welfare participation is associated with a significant reduction in her child's IQ score.
And this effect is reinforced by the mother's having grown up in an underclass neighborhood, defined as one with a high proportion of welfare recipients.
Although long-term welfare recipients are generally poor, persistent poverty does not seem to be the main reason for the poor performance of these children.
Moreover, our analysis suggests that policies that would raise the income of children on welfare simply by increasing AFDC benefits are not likely to improve cognitive development.
Children on welfare in high-benefit states do not perform measurably better than their counterparts in low-benefit states.
It's okay to have our theories about the value of state and the welfare, but when you are killing the brains of children in significant areas, I think the theory should bow to evidence, don't you?
Thank you.
More evidence of welfare has negative impact.
A similar study by Mary Cochran and Roger Gordon at the University of Michigan shows that the receipt of welfare income has negative effects on the long-term employment and earnings capacity of young boys.
The study shows that holding constant rates, parental education, family structure, and a range of other social variables higher, a non-welfare income obtained by the family during a boy's childhood was associated with higher earnings when the boy becomes an adult over the age of 25.
However, welfare income had the opposite effect.
The more welfare income received by a family while a boy was growing up, the lower the boy's earnings as an adult.
Now, whether that is due to cognitive deficiencies or a diminished work ethic or a higher propensity to crime, does it really matter?
Typically, liberals would dismiss this finding arguing that families which receive a lot of welfare payments have a lower total income than other families in society, and that it is the low overall family income, not and that it is the low overall family income, not welfare, which had a negative effect on the young boys.
But the Corcoran and Gordon study compares families whose average non-welfare incomes were identical.
In such cases, each extra dollar in welfare represents a net increase in overall financial resources available to the family.
This extra income, according to conventional socialist welfare theory, should have positive effects on the well-being of the children.
If only violence will work, if only we can get the right people pointing the right gun at the right people, we'll get paradise.
Just turn the jets down in hell, somehow we'll get heaven.
But the study shows that the extra welfare income, even though it produced a net increase in resources available to the family, had a negative impact on the development of young boys within the family.
The gangs don't come from nowhere.
The higher the welfare income received by the family, the lower the earnings obtained by the boys upon reaching adulthood.
The study suggests that an increase of $1,000 per year in welfare received by a family decreased a boy's future earnings by as much as 10%.
And we're not talking about a lot of earnings here.
Other studies have confirmed the negative effects of welfare on the development of children.
For example, young women raised in families dependent on welfare are two to three times more likely to drop out and fail to graduate from high school than are young women of similar race and socio-economic background not raised on welfare.
Similarly, single mothers raised as children in families receiving welfare remain on AFDC longer as adult parents than to single mothers not raised in welfare families, even when all other social and economic variables are held constant.
Welfare promotes illegitimacy.
Hey, I'm a big fan of sex.
We love the sex, but illegitimacy is a sex that costs children in terms of cognitive abilities, emotional stability, propensity to avoid crime, propensity or ability to defer gratification.
So illegitimacy is quite different from making the beast with two backs.
The welfare system does added harm to children by promoting illegitimacy.
The anti-marriage effects of welfare are simple and profound.
the current welfare system may be conceptualized best as a system that offers each single mother with two children a paycheck of combined benefits worth an average of between $8,500 and $15,000 depending on the state this is 10 years ago it's about double now I think sorry about that depending on The mother has a contract with the government.
She will continue to receive her paycheck as long as she does not marry an employed man.
What a great idea.
As long as a father and mother remain unmarried, they may obtain income from two sources, the mother's welfare and the father's earnings.
However, if the parents marry, they must rely on the father's earnings alone.
Welfare has thus made marriage economically irrational for most low-income parents.
It has transformed marriage from a legal institution designed to protect and nurture children into an institution that financially penalizes nearly all low-income parents who enter into it.
As long as a father and mother remain unmarried, they may obtain income from two sources.
Similarly, welfare has made it possible to raise a child without either the father or the mother having to hold a job.
Welfare has thus made a father with low education and skills at best financially irrelevant and at worst a net financial handicap to the mother and child.
Welfare has worked like an asset slowly corroding the social foundation of marriage in low-income communities.
All parties, the father, the mother and especially the child are damaged by this.
Largely because of welfare, illegitimacy and single-parenthood have become the conventional lifestyle option for raising children in many low-income communities.
As Washington Post reporter Leon Dash has shown in his book, when children want children, most unwed teen mothers conceive and deliver their babies deliberately rather than accidentally.
While young women do bear unwanted children in order to reap windfall profits from welfare, they are very much aware of the role welfare will play in supporting them once a child is born.
Thus, the availability of welfare plays an important role in influencing a woman's decision to have a child out of wedlock.
And it's just, by the by, it's not the amount of money that's in welfare.
Of course, it's a pretty poor income for anybody who has middle class aspirations.
But there is an enormous difference between $0 and $20,000 a year.
A whole lot more than between $20,000 and $40,000.
Trust me, as a philosopher, I'm fairly aware of that.
In welfare, as in most things in life, you get what you pay for.
The current welfare system pays for non-work and non-marriage and has achieved dramatic increases in both.
Scientific research confirms that welfare benefits to single mothers contribute directly to the rise in illegitimate births.
June O'Neill's research has found that holding constant a wide range of other variables, such as income, parental education, and urban and neighborhood setting, a 50% increase in the monthly value of AFDC and food stamp benefits led to a 43% increase in the number of out-of-wedlock births.
Other studies showing the effect of welfare in increasing illegitimacy are listed in the appendix of this paper.
I'll post this on my board at freedomainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D. The social consequences of rising illegitimacy, and I hope that you will make it through to the end of this video.
I know it's a little bit long, but this stuff is so important.
This entire generation of children, two, three generations of children we're talking about now.
From the very beginning, children born outside of marriage have a life stacked against them.
The impact on the child is significant and can be permanent.
Out of wedlock birth and growing up in a single parent family means the child is more likely to experience retarded cognitive, especially verbal development, lower educational achievement, lower job attainment, increased behavior and emotional problems, lower impulse control, and retarded social development.
Such children are far more likely to engage in early sexual activity, have children out of wedlock, be on welfare as adults, and engage in criminal activity.
Sorry. The absence of married parents is related to retarded development in early childhood.
Illegitimacy leads to delays in development.
A study of black infants aged five to six months living in households of lower socioeconomic status in America's inner cities found that male infants who experienced minimal interaction with their fathers had significantly lower levels of overall mental development and lower social responsiveness for novel stimuli.
Illegitimate children tend to have lessened cognitive development.
And yes, we all know illegitimate children who are brilliant, but we're talking statistics.
It's a bell curve.
It's just a shifted bell curve from the norm.
Many of these children have problems in controlling their activity, popularly called hyperactivity.
This lack of control usually is an indication of problems in learning that will arise later in the child's development.
The effect on boys is greater, at least in the early years.
And if you want to look at why children are so hyperactive in general, and why we need to dose them with Ritalin...
Thus consuming about 10% of their brain mass.
That's the damage that happens.
And if you look at these studies and statistics, you can very clearly see that a young boy who has, quote, ADHD has actually a normal level of hyperactivity or non-hyperactivity when he's actually around his father.
The presence of a father is equivalent to the doses of Ritalin.
In other words, we are drugging the children because we have paid their fathers to go away.
Do you see what an unbelievably sick society we are living in?
We pay the parents, we pay the mother to raise the children alone, we pay the father to go away, and then we have to drug the children.
Staggering. Similar findings were enumerated again in the recent 1992 National Institute of Child Health and Development Summary Outcomes of Early Childbearing and Appraisal of Recent Evidence.
And such findings are in line with earlier studies.
For instance, Project Talent, a federal survey commissioned in 1960, which tracked the development of 375,000 high school students, from 1960 through 1961, found that children born outside marriage were likely to have lower cognitive scores, lower educational aspirations, and greater likelihood of becoming teenage parents themselves.
Once again, all these effects were greater for boys.
I just see that masculinity these days, particularly boys, men are considered to be broken women.
Femininity is the norm because women tend to be more complacent and compliant when they're girls.
That men are just broken women and that's because they're raised without fathers.
See how well the women would do if they were raised without mothers.
The absence of married parents risks emotional and behavioral problems during childhood.
The effects of illegitimacy continue to compound through childhood.
The National Health Interview Survey of Child Health confirms that children born out of wedlock have far more behavioral and emotional problems than do children in intact married families.
These problems include antisocial behavior, Disobedience in school, cheating and lying, bullying and cruelty to others, breaking things.
Deliberately, failure to feel sorry after misbehaving.
Elements of sociopathy, that's mine.
Hyperactive behavior, difficulty concentrating or paying attention, becoming easily confused, acting without thinking, being restless or overactive.
Headstrong behavior, easily losing one's temper, being stubborn, irritable, disobedient at home, arguing excessively.
When you get raised by passive-aggressive women, you don't know how to handle your aggressiveness as a man.
Peer conflict, having trouble getting along with others, being not liked, being withdrawn.
Dependent behavior, crying too much, particularly in YouTube videos.
No wait, that's me. Being too dependent on others, demanding attention, clinging to adults.
Children raised by never married mothers have significantly higher levels of all of the above behavior patterns when compared to children raised by both biological parents.
When comparisons are made between families that are identical in race, income, number of children and mother's education, the behavioral differences between illegitimate and legitimate children actually widen.
Compared to children living with both biological parents in similar socio-economic circumstances, children of never married mothers exhibit 68% more antisocial behavior, 24% more headstrong behavior, 33% more hyperactive behavior.
78% more peer conflict and 53% more dependency.
Overall, children of never married mothers have behavioral problems that score nearly three times higher than children raised in comparable intact families.
Do you see how we are skeptical, we libertarians, we anarchists, that those who say the welfare state helps the poor give a flying fuck about the poor children?
It's the reason you never heard of this.
Children born out of wedlock have less ability to delay gratification and poor impulse control, control over anger and sexual gratification.
They have a weaker sense of conscience or sense of right and wrong.
Adding to all of this is a sad fact that the incidence of child abuse is higher among single-parent families.
It's not to blame women, but when women raise children alone, there is a higher incidence of child abuse.
But, you know, because we care about the children that we want this.
Being born out of wedlock increases the probability of teen sexual activity.
Boys and girls born out of wedlock and raised by never married mothers are two and a half times more likely to be sexually active as teenagers when compared to legitimate children raised in intact married couple families.
This finding applies to both blacks and whites.
Children born out of wedlock whose mother is married after the child's birth appear to be slightly less likely to be sexually active in terms as teens, but are still twice as active on average as legitimate teens of intact married couples.
Now, how are you going to teach a child restraint and maturity when you couldn't even stay married to the guy who impregnated you or wouldn't marry him, despite the fact that it's better for her?
The kid. Welfare is entirely founded on the erosion of the deferral of gratification.
How are you going to teach your kids to be responsible?
The absence of married parents is related to poor academic performance during school years.
The risks and consequences of illegitimacy continue through the middle years of childhood and express themselves in poor academic performance.
A 1988 study by Sheila F. Krein and Andrea H. Beller of the University of Illinois Finds that the longer the time spent in a single parent family, the lower the education attained by a child.
In general, a boy's educational attainment was cut by one tenth of a year for each year spent as a child in a single parent home.
One tenth of a year for each year spent as a child in a single parent home.
Controlling for family income did not reduce the magnitude of the effect noticeably.
These findings are confirmed again and again in studies conducted in the US and abroad which demonstrate that illegitimacy is also associated with lower job and salary attainment.
The absence of married parents leads to intergenerational illegitimacy.
Being born outside of marriage significantly reduces the chances the child will grow up to have an intact marriage.
Children born outside of marriage themselves are three times more likely to be on welfare when they grow up.
Daughters of single mothers are twice as likely to be single mothers themselves if they are black and only slightly less so if they are white.
And boys living in a single-parent family are twice as likely to father a child out of wedlock as boys from a two-parent home.
The talent study noted earlier already had found that children born to teenage parents are more likely to become teen parents themselves.
We live what we learn. That's me.
Illegitimacy is a major factor in America's crime wave.
This is the 90s. Lack of married parents, rather than race or poverty, is the principal factor in the crime rate.
It has been known for some time that high rates of welfare dependency correlate with high rates of crime among young men in the neighborhood.
But more important, a major 1980 study of 11,000 individuals Found that, quote, the percentage of single-parent households with children between the ages of 12 and 20 is significantly associated with rates of violent crime and burglary.
I'm just talking having a joint.
The same study makes clear that the widespread popular assumption that there is an association between race and crime is false.
Illegitimacy is the key factor.
And was it two or three times as many black kids grew up in single-parent families?
The absence of marriage and the failure to form and maintain intact families explains the incidence of high crime in a neighborhood among whites as well as blacks.
This study also concludes that poverty does not explain the incidence of crime.
This is a dramatic reversal of conventional wisdom.
Research on underclass behavior by Dr.
June O'Neill confirms the linkage between crime and single-parent families.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, O'Neill found that young black men raised in single-parent families are twice as likely To engage in criminal activities when compared to black men raised in two parent families.
Even after holding constant a wide range of variables such as family income, urban residence, neighborhood environment, and parents' education, growing up in a single parent family in a neighborhood with many other single parent families on welfare triples the probability that a young black man will engage in criminal activity.
Conclusion In vetoing the welfare reform legislation passed by the House and Senate, President Clinton has embraced the central erroneous tenets of liberal welfarism.
The Clinton administration's report on welfare, which formed the basis for the President's veto, makes clear a belief that rapid and automatic increases in welfare spending are essential to the well-being of children, and that any attempts to slow the growth of future welfare spending will significantly harm children.
Well, who cares about what Clinton said or what anybody's saying these days?
The important thing, obviously, to understand from that is that moral theories, or rather ignorance of moral theories, are acting in direct opposition to reasonable moral theories, such as violence cannot be—the end does not justify the means.
The end is the means. Violence produces catastrophe.
Violence is a cancer on society, and the victims of violence are always the most helpless.
Are always the most helpless.
The children. I said in the Iraq video that when you salute the flag, you are standing in blood.
When you salute the welfare state, you are neck deep in ignorance.
And not just yours, of course.
You've never been told, you've never been told, but now that you know.
It is the crippling of the minds of a child.
Surely the most precious resource this planet has.
The crippling of the minds of children.
The herding of people into prisons through the destruction of their emotional maturities.
All of this is the result.
Whenever you choose violence, you choose disaster.
Whenever you choose violence you choose disaster.
You cannot have the welfare state without these unbelievably toxic and destructive effects on children.
You cannot ever, ever, ever, ever choose violence without choosing blood and destruction.
Thank you so much for watching.
Please drop by my website to pick up a couple of my books, which I think you will really enjoy.
Universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, on truth, the tyranny of illusion, about philosophy and your family and your childhood, and a very good novel, I think, called The God of Atheists.
I also look forward to your donations now that I'm doing this full-time.
Remember, the philosopher, he must eat, and I need additional bowling ball wax for my head.
Thank you so much for watching.
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