A lot of people out there probably think I am an uncaring bastard

 and maybe I am, and maybe I am not.




We do have a duty as human beings to help those that can not help themselves. It is either that or euthanize them and I certainly do not have the stomach for that, at least not for those that truly can't help themselves. I can think of a few people out there that are professional system workers that ought to be removed but these are capable people and not the truly needy.



My biggest beef is that al of this so-called social justice comes from a Federal level rather than a local level. The feds are just too damned big and cumbersome and akward to do any real good and Lord only knows how ineffecient and expensive they are. This does not even begin to cover the red tape and self imposed regulations it places on itself.



Although I really want to see most of the various social programs chopped off of the fedreal budget, I do not want to see them go away entirely. I simply a few of them to be dropped down a couple of pegs to a more local level where they can be monitored a lot closer.



Grass roots is where it is at. The local level is far more efficient than the cumbersome federal government and is a lot more personal, too. For example if welfare as we know it was reduced to say, a municipal level there would be a whole lot fewer people on it than there are now simply because it would be a lot easier to spot the fakers and chiselers as the recipients would be our neighbors.



I have lived in smaller towns where there were an awful lot of people that were busy and successful and were certainly more than willing to hire people to either work for them in their business or simply do things for them around the house. Years ago I made a halfway decent living doing just that. I was a go-to guy for just about anything from unloading a truck to building a house or gear shed.



Hiring was pretty simple as I had no phone. There were a couple of places that took messages for me, two of them were bars and I guess that today I simply would have had my own cell phone like I do now, it was a pretty good deal. I'd stump in once a day and as often as not there would be a message to call someone and that generally meant another job was headed my way unless it was some babe in which case I knew that I had something of another nature to take care of but I digress.



Still, at a local level there were a number of programs that existed at the time and many were state funded which means the Feds pretty much were eliminated. The state had control and could trim, add to or even eliminate the entire program as needed.



Corruption tends to be a little easier to spot at lower levels, too.



I know of one program that decided to justify their existance with the number of people they served and to inflate the numbers they simply tried to get everyone that stepped through the door to sign in. You got it, the delivery people from Fedex and UPS were asked to sign in as was everyone else that darkened the door.



That didn't last too long because someone did the right thing and brought this little escapade to the attention of the local paper who mentioned this and sure enough, the state looked into it and threw out a few penalty markers and gave them a ten-yard penalty. While nobody went to jail, the program came under the microscope and had to clean it's act up. This would never have happened if it was a Federal program. They would have simply been awarded yet MORE Federal dollars and the leaders of the program would have continued to build their little empire and chip away at their little agenda.



Local programs are more visible and more likely to be watched by people that know the people working in them. They also run a whole lot cheaper, too because they do not have the Beast of Federal Bureaucracy to feed.



Another thing we have to do is look at the churches that historically did a lot of social work before they started skating after the Great Society programs of the 60s allowed them to by stepping in and doing things they had once done.



Churches in this country have been tax exempt since Day One and for generations they were quite active in the community doing all sorts of things for the community. While I suppose they still do, they do not seem to take as active an interest in the persoanl lives of their members as they used to. Maybe thay ought to return to their roots and take some of the brunt off of the overtaxed government programs.



I am not in any way saying that people that run into hardships should be thrown to the wolves. What I am saying is that huge, costly, totally impersonal federal programs that are ineffective and do little more than make people dependent on them should be tossed and the job of pitching in should be send down to a local level where it belongs.



People at a local level are more likely to give their neighbors a hand up instead of a handout.




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