November 10, 2014
By: Kelly Diamond, Publisher
I see a lot of local news articles. And I’ve done a few write ups here about the over regulation of businesses by the government.
But perhaps the bigger picture isn’t the regulations. Perhaps the bigger picture is dependency. This article is specifically for those who believe that we pay into the system because we receive from the system. This ALSO goes out to those who find people like me callous for opposing taxes which are purported to help the poor.
Our first story is of the 90 year old man who was cited for feeding the homeless on the beach in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He is known as “Chef Arnold” and has done this for decades. There is an ordinance that has deemed this activity unlawful. Amazing how a law can quickly change a man from charitable to criminal in a matter of a single vote.
The ordinance was meant to address how the parks have been overrun with homeless individuals, which has allegedly inhibited locals and businesses from accessing these areas of the city.
It would seem the mayor took his cues from Brazil during the FIFA World Cup and decided to shift the “problem” to another area of the city. Understandably, city officials probably do get tired of hearing the citizens complain about the homelessness issue, demanding that they do something about it. But the mayor hasn’t don’t anything to fix the homeless problem… unless the problem wasn’t that people were homeless but rather that they had the audacity to be homeless in an affluent area of the public.
To be fair, feeding meals to homeless people doesn’t solve the homeless problem either. It solves the immediate hunger problem for those who are unable to feed themselves. But private charity is just that: what someone chooses to do with their time and resources is entirely up to them. What someone chooses to do with other people’s time and resources, however, is not. The mayor employed the time and resources of local police, has congested the courts, and expended tax dollars to go after this man and his two pastor friends.
And while feeding the homeless doesn’t fix the homeless problem, it doesn’t harm anyone either.
If you look at the various “Tent Cities” around the United States they are often run by donations and local pastors of small churches. In Lakewood, New Jersey, the homeless have carved out a little campsite away from the city and out of everyone else’s business. They are self-sufficient, privately funded, and the population of approximately 80 people survive off about $1,000 per month!
Not good enough! While the link above indicates the judge allowed them to stay, this year, they were shut down. This is happening all over America, and these individuals are figuring out how to survive on their own, partially because they did not qualify for public assistance. Others don’t want to get on public assistance… they liked their life in the camp.
The government officials interviewed like to boast about how much they spend every year on the poor, but heaven forbid the poor do for themselves! Lakewood spent between $400,000 and $600,000 to evict these people. Money well spent? According to their own little budget, that money could’ve kept the tent city going for another 600 months (or 50 years!!).
So far, feeding the poor in certain areas is a menace, letting the homeless fend for themselves in the woods somewhere is a menace, so what about if ONE homeless woman were to build herself a home by itself in the woods? If the groups of homeless are the issue, maybe just one person solving her problems isn’t so bad.
Wrong. A homeless woman in Northern Quebec tried building her own house. Private individuals decided to help her in this endeavor, offering her materials for this undertaking. The Canadian government gets a whiff of people coming together and helping one another, and puts an end to it.
“The Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry has charged Necan with breaches of the Public Lands Act that carry fines of up to $10,000, and up to an additional $1,000 fine each time she is caught continuing to build. Necan believes it is because somehow the place she grew up has become Crown land.”
I’d like to offer up the government’s defense of such an act, but they were unavailable for comment for any of the repeated efforts made by CBC.
This next case takes us to Maine: a corner of the northeast United States consisting of fabulous blueberries! Two men were sentenced to two years in prison each for hiring undocumented immigrants. They told federal officers that they had completed federally required documentation regarding the immigration status of their employees, but that was not true. They were then convicted of knowingly hiring individuals who were not legally living in the United States.
So it’s criminal to feed the needy, leave the needy alone, or employ the needy. It really has me wondering if private affairs between private citizens is really… well… private! Check out where private exchanges have gone:
- If I invite you over to dinner at my house, and choose to feed you from my unregulated, pH imbalanced, two-sink kitchen for free, that’s fine. Although, it might not be acceptable in New York!
- If I choose to give you money, no questions asked, when you asked for it on the street, that’s usually okay, thought there are cities that have signs posted saying “No Panhandling”.
- If you choose to help me move my stuff out of my apartment in exchange for a 6 pack of beer and a pizza, that business arrangement is okay… although technically we should each be taxed for the value of that barter.
I want people to do for themselves. I want more accountability and self-responsibility. I want to render the welfare state irrelevant and allow people to help one another in a more direct way through mutual aid and local community outreaches. Charity should be just as competitive as any other business: earning the contributions of every donor and answering to them directly.
Working people are forced to borrow money for houses, cars, and school because they have to pay their fair share in taxes. Imagine if they could just keep that money. All of it. How much debt would we have then? It’s like the government doesn’t really want people to do for themselves, they want that leverage of welfare, something needful, that they can dangle over people for their votes.
But HOW on earth can any of this be achieved when whenever people do organize voluntarily, the government snuffs them out? How can people advocate for self-sufficiency and private sector solutions when that’s blocked at every turn? I don’t know if there is an answer. But when charity becomes activism and then becomes acts of civil disobedience, I think it is indicative of the horrible transformations America has undergone while we were sleeping.
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The government pogues have found so many ways to make people dependent on government. The thing I find funny is that the white middle class works their asses off struggling to support themselves with maxed out credit and high taxes while everyone else is living off their backs. It is funny that many in the younger generation realize this scam and are going abroad to live.
After serving a full career in the US Military and spending a total of 17 years overseas the more time I spend back in the US to more disgusted I get with all the lies that America is a free country, but we need more police and in order for us to be safer we don’t need to be armed.
Americans are too complacent and are pissing away all their freedoms for a little false security. At least in these countries with perceived less freedoms they don’t tout how free the country is and fool the citizens that they are free when they are not. Too many Americans are Blue Pill people and are sheep for the slaughter.
Hey Y’all, you asked me to speak my mind, so here goes: This is a real touchy subject for me…I am a Vietnam combat veteran, and I have chosen to “opt put” of the system as much as possible. Here is what happened to me …A few years back, I was homeless, and trying to find a place to survive out of the rat race of society. I met a man who was retired, and owned over 200 acres, which bordered 3 roads, one of which was gravel, and remote. He let me stay there in an old camper, which I spent quite a bit of time fixing with salvaged materials, and building a roof over with the same materials. Another man owned 10 acres next to this property, which he used for hunting once, or twice a year. There were no other dwellings on this road for 2 1/2 miles but me. I lived there 14 years until one day the neighbor guy called the township, and reported me for living in a place zoned for agriculture. This led to the township trespassing (when I was not home) taking pictures, and filing a complaint against the my friend that owned the 200 acres I was living on. In summery, it cost my friend 12 thousand in fiat currency, in legal fees, and fines, and the roof over had to be removed. After this, the roof leaked to the point of water running out of the light fixtures when it rained, and black mold so strong it hurt my eyes, and breathing was difficult. Needless to say, I was forced to move out, and relocate. I finally received VA disability after a substantial waiting period. Without help from friends I would have had great difficulty surviving all of this. I must add that I almost died for this country five times in my 2yrs. in the military, and in the war. Had I knew what I know now, I would have never allow myself to be drafted…This is a very small portion of what this system has caused me to go through, trust me, you would not want to know the rest of my story, or the grief I have been through.
About the homeless . . . years ago, in Reno, Nevada, there was (and continues) a ordinance against panhandling obviously to protect tourism and casinos. Along with a few underemployed lawyers I did some “pro bono” legal work to get rid of the ordinance. No luck. But I did realize that at $100 a day in jail, it cost $3000 a month to punish the panhandlers. I also found out the the State of California had a prison near the state line with Nevada and took released inmates to the bus and bought them a ticket to Reno. That gave me an idea and I came up with what I thought was the perfect plan: clean them up, put $200 in their pocket, and buy them a one way ticket to Hawaii. I did spread the joke about but I wasn’t serious. It seems another state somehow heard me and is presently in trouble for acting on my brilliant plan. At the same time I owned part of a vacant church which was a homeless shelter. For the cost of two days in jail, the shelter could feed and house and bathe and receive mail for the homeless for a month. The homeless shelter was not a success – it was too small and it turns out that most of the homeless were ex-mental cases from Vietnam that Governor Reagan had turned out onto the street to save money — anyway, the vets preferred to live outdoors than in a cage, even if it were a church. There was one exception to the behavior. As winter approached, the inventive homeless managed to get picked up and sentenced to six months which got them fed and housed over the harsh winter and released into the pleasant spring. The two take-aways are that 1) the homeless problem is “complicated” i the sense that it would take comprehending a couple compound sentences to solve it; 2) there is just no end to the stupidity and inhumanity of government — and petit government with petit solutions is the worst. I guess there must be a fascist gene built in to all of us that can turned on the instant you are elected or appointed to even the smallest post.
All the issues you raise have “other sides” of the argument. But none that lead to solution. Most social workers will tell you that one a person or family has fallen through the “safety net” provided by government, it is extremely difficult to get them back to the other side of it: what may be a $300 problem to pay rent becomes a $1000 problem to get someone back into an apartment. Once shelter goes, so do jobs, schools, and a lot of other services we take for granted. Long short, it takes nearly $5000 to put a person who has fallen through the cracks back to right — when it would have only take $300 to keep it from happening at all.
And the idea of a war on self-sufficiency extends WAY beyond the homeless — it extends to any of us who wish to disconnect from the “helpful” menace of government — the regulation of all sorts of shelters will follow you deep into your own woods and your own private property. It’s hard to know how far to run. And what countries are better. Thanks for Global Wealth Protection — but oftentimes it’s not our wealth that needs saving . . . it’s us.