Family Issues Friday - part 6

  Last Friday, in Something simply MUST be done , I promised to begin to explore what "family issues" would be like without government involvement. I tried to demonstrate the amazing power of private solutions using the remarkable example of the growth of the computer industry with no government money, interference, regulation, or control. The lesson we should learn from that is that WE, ordinary people, can create magnificent solutions that government cannot even dream of duplicating... and that every time we allow some task... any task... to be taken by government, we are condemning ourselves to miserable, often disastrous results.

Let's look at one of the hardest of the family issues... what to do with orphans, problem children, and those whose home life is dangerous. The government solution is to place them in foster care, monitored by government agencies, and the overall results are clearly terrible. Repeating from Foster Care - Solution or Scandal? :

Children were abused and neglected 3 times more often by state caregivers than by parents. Children who received "services" from CPS died as a result of abuse 16 times more often than children in the general population. Children died as a result of abuse in foster care 5.25 times more often than children in the general population.

But, (the cry goes up from do-gooders) something simply MUST be done. We can't ignore the problems... who can we trust but government? The simple, elegant, in-our-faces answer is TRUST OURSELVES!

This exercise is going to require some imagination, for many reasons. Government has been intruding into and controlling aspects of family life  for a very long time. It would be nice to look to the way problems were solved before government intrusion, but facts about them have been obliterated by time and by the propagandistic lies told by history revisionists to justify the terrible results by government agencies.

Orphanges

Even if we can get past fictional images of poor Oliver Twist, and think back about what we believe we know about orphanages, we're bound to be influenced by the bleak conditions we've heard about. When we think about those bleak conditions, we are bound to compare them with what we think of as "normal" now, and be appalled, without even realizing that most living conditions were bleak compared to what we have now. Would a current-day orphanage have conditions similar to a hundred years ago? Not likely, since we all have electricity, running water and indoor toilets now. We also have a great many other labor-saving and life-enhancing objects that were not even imagined then.

The word "orphanage" has been tagged with so much negative emotional baggage that when Mary Jo Copeland of Sharing and Caring Hands sought a location to open a modern one, she was refused by several outlying suburbs. The word, or idea, of "orphanages", once slapped onto her Gift of Mary Children's Home plans, caused a ridiculous emotional outcry.

Remember the Spencer Tracy/Mickey Rooney movie "Boys Town"? You may not be aware that it was originally started in 1917 by Father Flanagan, with $90, but has now grown into "Girls and Boys Town". In 2002, it spent $170 million, with 87.8% going directly into it's youth programs. Their slogan is "Changing the way America cares for her children and families". In 2002, a record number of children - 37,984 - received help, healing and hope from Girls and Boys Town's direct care programs at 19 sites in 14 states and in the District of Columbia.

There have been, throughout our history, large numbers of charitable organizations to care for children in need, and many of them still exist. In the past, only charitable funds were available to such facilities, but many are now entwined with government, licensed and regulated, receiving children that are wards of the court, and being paid by the government.

I want you to consider how that entwinement can change such an organization. First, and most obvious, is the increase in paperwork for reporting back to government. We're only a week from our tax deadline, so the insanity of government paperwork may be obvious to you. The organization will need to beef up the clerical staff just for that, taking resources further away from child care itself. Next are the regulations, written for all similar facilities, which means that they don't take into account local conditions or needs. Never mind that the group may have been doing an unquestionably splendid job for decades, they will still have to comply with one-size-fits-all rules and regs, and that will change the way they work. Because they can't have one way for government cases and another for charitable cases, and because the government has force behind their rules, the organization modifies to meet government demands... or refuses children from government.

There certainly are organizations that, despite the lure of "free" government funds, refuse it, knowing that it will twist their organization away from their primary cause.

A purely charitably-funded organization has to rely on it's reputation, which depends on their results. Individuals are not likely to contribute if there is the slightest hint of improper or unsuccessful results... because those contributors worked to earn the money they're giving. How much easier is it to cheat a source that depends on written reports and perhaps an occasional visit? As if to support what I had already planned to write, here's an item from yesterday's St. Paul Pioneer Press:

In the state's biggest child-care fraud case, a Minneapolis day-care provider pleaded guilty Tuesday to eight felonies stemming from a scheme to defraud the government of more than $500,000 in day-care funds and federal food and nutrition programs.

If you or I were defrauded of $500,000, we would be considered incompetent idiots, and get no slack for not having noticed something wrong long ago. That's half a million dollars WASTED, tossed down a rat-hole by our government. The crooks have finally been caught and prosecuted, again at great expense to us. The perpetrators will go to prison, where we will pay still more to confine them, and be ordered to pay back the loss. Would you care to hold your breath waiting for any of that money?

It would be nice to consider that crooks with a little ingenuity are targeting government programs instead of us... until we realize that we are the ones paying for such incompetence.

According to the AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, total charitable giving in the U.S. came to $241 billion in 2002, or about 1 percent more than in 2001. Given our crummy economy, that's nothing short of impressive!

$241 BILLION! In spite of enormous taxes and crippling regulations, Americans are still unbelievably caring and generous.  How then can anyone be ignorant enough to believe that we need government to handle any of our problems?

Just imagine what we could do if government simply got the hell out of our way.