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Politics : To be a Liberal,you have to believe that..... -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: mark silvers who wrote (789)	9/7/1999 1:37:00 PM
From: Null Dog Ago	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6418

What if you live in a desert?

To: mark silvers who wrote (789)	9/7/1999 2:03:00 PM
From: MikeH	Respond to of 6418

If you want to teach people to fish, here is what they used to do... In the days before the great society, in the bygone era of big business, union breaking, and rampant industrialization. When JP Morgan was the most important man in America, and many still bore the wounds of the civil war this is how they handled teaching men to fish. Work Farms The poor we allowed to move to, live on, and work on farms, some sponsered by states, and others by charity. Here they learned how to work the land, do carpentry, how to shoe a horse, and to fix the machines of the time. This is what we need to do again today. Not to teach people to farm, God knows that in a couple decades the family farm will be extinct. No, instead we need to take all that welfare money we waste on administrators and paying people per baby, and build communities to teach people how to fish. I wrote a big thesis on this in college, I'll keep it verbose though. 1) States use donated or state owned land to set up state owned or privitized institutions similar to community colleges. 2) However, each student works in a trade, and instead of learning history, they learn skills deemed necessary by private industry. Census information is used to determine what people learn, and aptitude tests give a menu of items to an individual depending on his/her intelligence and skills. (Similar to what the military does) 3) All students also work on site, maintaining the institution, and some work on site in industries that do not compete with private industry. Some are janitors, others grow food, some work in the kitchen. 4) All students are housed on site, along with their children. Their children are educated on site, but student teachers, under professional management. (After all, there is a teacher shortage isn't there) What I did in my thesis was to try and blend the ideals of pure communism that works great for the masses, with capitalism which works for the country. Or a centrally planned, communist community, for the benefit of a capitalist society. This is how you teach a man to fish. Not by paying AFDC per child. Not by dishing out food stamps so they can convert them into cigerettes and drugs. The money for the poor needs to be strongly controlled, but, after they learn to fish, they once again can join the capatilist society. The same communites should also work for rehabilitating low risk criminals, and offer a permanent workplace for the mildly retarded. Because of the self sustaining factor, and the strong control of funds, these campuses would be much cheaper to rehabilitate the poor than the current system. But, I figured there would be significant resistance to this by the poor, who would view it as a kind of indentured servitude or imprisonment. Surprisingly, one liberal professor felt that my ideas were too draconian, and ignored compassion. But, I luckily had a conservative reviewer too, who thought that my ideas were very good, but drew to heavily from Walden. Btw, the title of my thesis was "How to Teach a Man to Fish"