“Sure Start” is of course a copy of the American “Head Start” which, when one checks children at the END of their schooling, has been sure to be totally ineffective.

The “Great Society” Welfare State programs of the 1960s (Food Stamps, Head Start…. and on and on) were supposed to transform America – and they did, but not in the way their supporters said they would.

The Great Society took a country in the 1950s that had very real faults, but was (to use T. Parson’s word) “Functional” and have made it radically DYSFUCTIONAL. Where about half the entire population either work for government (at all levels) or live on benefits.

In the case of some Great Society supporters (such as Cloward and Piven) this was deliberate. They wanted to create an unsustainable system – in order to create economic and social collapse (in the hope that a socialist society would rise from the ashes of “capitalism”).

Veryretired.

On tar and feathers – textbook example of how culture has changed occured a few years ago.

An unelected judge in New Hampshre declared that the State must have a State wide property tax – in order to spend more money on the govenrment schools.

A judge demanding more govenrment spending would have been met with laughter not so long ago.

And, when they worked out he was serious, such as judge would indeed have been subjected to tar and feathers – as many people were in New England for defending taxation without the consent of the governed (the King’s judges were particularly detested). Even in the early 1900s citizens “taking the law into their own hands” (and where better place could it be?) were not unknown in New Hampshire.

Yet the modern population just grumble – and OBEY.

The collectivist ideology of the education system (and the media) have already given the population in wide areas of the United States a “slave mentality”.

It is clear beyond dispute that most, if not all, of the collectivists’ allegedly compassionate programs not only are ineffective, but actually worsen the problems they are supposed to help, and create numerous negative side-effects as well.

Meanwhile, as poverty increases rather than decreasing, and poor families find maintaining a traditional family structure is penalized, and their federally assisted schools are nightmares of disfunction, and their neighborhoods are violent war zones of gangs fighting the war on drugs, and their jobs have been destroyed by the costs of the entitlements they receive, and their politicians are routinely sent to jail for felonious corruption on a scale that makes their own crimes seem modest indeed, the great “look how compassionate I am” telethon goes on, uninterrupted, 24/7.

The rule should be very simple—any proponent of a social format should be required to live within that format before any credibility is granted, or any suggestion is acted upon.

Seems to me there was a fairly blunt response to another aristocrat who declared, when the dire poverty of the common people was mentioned, “Let them eat cake.”

Maybe tar and feathers would be enough, but I don’t know…

Polly supports Sure Start. Sure Start is advertised as being intended to help poor kids. Who can be against that. She establishes her moral virtue and sets opponents (and Libertarians in particular) as being heartless and cruel. The fact that Sure Start is now established as having no detectable effect is not seen as a weakness. Indeed it proves the need to increase the program, to spend more money and this must be repeated until that magic threshold is achieved.

In this debate, our opponents are not setting out to be rational and amenable. No they set themselves up as virtuous. So to start from a position of arguing on their terms, sets us up to prove Polly’s contention that we are heartless and selfish. Rather we need to undermine that sainthood in order to start the rational debate.

They are not talking public nonsense.

They are talking nonsense to a minority of their own kind.

I have no interest in the perversions of The Flying Fat Man.

Indeed. And I’d like to think this is at least implicit in much of what I’ve written. Highlighting the hypocrisy of bien-pensant leftists – which is to say, highlighting their dishonesty – is a way to draw attention to the fact that it would be unwise to trust them. Or to give them power over others. There are of course other reasons to avoid doing so, not least that Marxism and its variants give license to all manner of unpleasant urges and dispositions, including explicitly sadistic and vindictive ones. But the extent of the dishonesty and basis for suspicion is often most apparent in the mismatch between professed ideals and actual lived values. It’s an obvious weak point, and an illustrative one.

It is just the real one who is not.

The collectivists would be just as bad if they were not hypocrites.

But the fact that so many of them are hypocrites is a useful weapon.