"The legacy of Democrats and Republicans approaches: Libertarianism by bankruptcy." – Nick Nuessle
If you have been reading my stuff for a while you know that one of the metrics I follow to understand the factual condition of the U.S. economy is the number of people receiving food assistance from the government. As I continued on this bent I also found that the correlation between food assistance and housing assistance is very, very high. Somewhere over 60% of SNAP recipients (what was formerly called Food Stamps) receive housing assistance (live in subsidized housing, otherwise known as housing projects).
Stay with me... I belong to a "Farmers Co-op", a place where small guys can rent - essentially share - equipment (as well as get a great deal of data... what dates to plant what, how to preserve food, how to make cheese, how to care for livestock...).
Every time that I drive our garbage into town I pass a large public housing project. What struck me about these projects was the number of kitchen gardens behind the structures. "Wow!" I thought. I have lived in New York and Miami and never had I seen a garden anywhere on the grounds of a public housing project (though they had the space). Since these folks have already taken this much initiative... why couldn't they have a barn for dairy animals and a coop for chickens? The "city" of Lebanon, TN has an "inmate's garden" - so they have the equipment - and plenty of land... why not make more space available for growing feed corn... why not bale up the hay that the town cuts along the roads... and make this available to these folks?
Isn't there a shot that by doing so some of these folks will learn how to make money as well as feed themselves? If a nearly 50 year old guy like me can raise as much food as I do part time, why wouldn't these younger families be able to, and benefit from, these efforts?
Well, I pointed this out to the county, the city, and the state... and so far, no go. Could it be that Government, ESPECIALLY the Left, does not WANT these folks to find their way? If they did, and became money-making-tax-paying-contributing-members-of-society, maybe they wouldn't vote for the Left?
"I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it." -- Benjamin Franklin
There is a better way.