The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1147567
C-10 Wednesday, July 24, 2019 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg My Point of View by Dr. H. K. Fenol, Jr., M.D. Dubai of the United Arab Emirates Points to Ponder by Rev. Ford Bond The Christian Nation Continued on page 11 Continued on page 11 Continued on page 11 Continued on page 11 Minority View by Walter E. Williams Things haven't always been this way Continued on page 11 Here's a suggestion. How about setting up some high school rifle clubs? Students would bring their own rifles to school, store them with the team coach and, after classes, collect them for practice. You say: "Williams, you must be crazy! To prevent gun violence, we must do all we can to keep guns out of the hands of kids." There's a problem with this rea- soning. Prior to the 1960s, many public high schools had shooting clubs. In New York City, shooting clubs were started at Boys, Curtis, Commercial, Manual Training and Stuyvesant high schools. Students carried their rifles to school on the subway and turned them over to their homeroom or gym teacher. Rifles were retrieved after school for target practice. In some rural areas across the nation, there was a long tradition of high school stu- dents hunting before classes and storing their rifles in the trunks of their cars, parked on school grounds, during the school day. Today, any school principal per- mitting rifles clubs or allowing ri- fles on school grounds would be fired, possibly imprisoned. Here's my question: Have .30 -30 caliber Win- chesters and .22 cali- ber rifles changed to become more violent? If indeed rifles have become more violent, what can be done to pacify them? Will rifle psychiatric counsel- ing help to stop these weapons from commit- ting gun violence? You say: "Wil- liams, that's lunacy! Guns are in- animate objects and as such cannot act." You're right. Only people can act. That means that we ought to abandon the phrase "gun violence" because guns cannot act and hence cannot be violent. If guns haven't changed, it must be that people, and what's consid- ered acceptable behavior, have changed. Violence with guns is just a tiny example. What ex- plains a lot of what we see today is growing cultural deviancy. Twen- ty-nine percent of white children, 53% of Hispanic children and 73% of black children are born to un- married women. The absence of a husband and father in the home is a strong contribut- ing factor to poverty, school failure, crime, drug abuse, emotion- al disturbance and a host of other social problems. By the way, the low marriage rate among blacks is relatively new. Census data shows that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults from 1890 to 1940. According to the 1938 Encyclopaedia of the Social Scienc- es, that year only 11% of black chil- dren and 3% of white children were born to unwed mothers. In 1954, I graduated from Phila- delphia's Benjamin Franklin High School, the city's poorest school. During those days, there were no school policemen. Today, close to 400 police patrol Philadelphia Pursuit of the Cure by Star Parker Minimum wage laws are a terrible idea Lucid Moments By Bart Stinson Follow the money Democrats in Congress have again brought the minimum wage to the national political stage. Legislation moving forward in the House, H.R. 582, the Raise the Wage Act, would increase the national minimum wage from the current $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour in increments spanning the next five years. Minimum wage is a highly par- tisan issue, reflecting the very different ways the two parties view economic reality. When the Pew Research Cen- ter surveyed voters during the 2016 presidential campaign, 82 percent of Hillary Clinton sup- porters favored raising the fed- eral minimum wage to $15 per hour, while only 21 percent of Donald Trump supporters fa- vored the idea. What drives the difference be- tween the parties? Some would like to say it's be- cause Republicans are pro-busi- ness and Democrats are pro- worker. Some would like to say it's because Republicans are for the wealthy and Democrats are for those with low income. But I reject this take on things. The thrust of all my work fo- cuses on improving the lot of low- income Americans. And I think the minimum wage is a terrible idea. I operate a business, albeit a nonprofit business. How do I decide how much to pay employees? I determine what I can afford and then try to get the best people I can at that wage. Suppose what I decide I can af- ford is not enough to attract the kind of person I am looking for. I won't get any applicants. I've got to figure out how I can pay more, or if it is viable to hire peo- ple less qualified and hope they will learn on the job and then not quit if their salary does not grow with their performance. In short, these are dynamic and highly personalized calcu- lations between a business own- er, workers and the marketplace. How can it possibly work if the government gets involved telling me what I should pay people? It can't work, and it doesn't work. Minimum wage advocates want to claim that it's different on the lowest rung of the pay scale. But no, it's not different. Every employer pays as much as he or she can to get the best possible workforce. If the government sets a floor on what can be paid for a certain kind of job, either the job won't be filled; someone overqualified will do it; or automation will sub- stitute. There's tons of research on the minimum wage. But the bottom line is common sense. All em- ployers will hire the best work- force they can afford. If govern- ment limits what they can af- ford, the workforce will be con- strained. A new report from the Con- gressional Budget Office con- firms the common-sense conclu- sion. Although a $15 minimum wage would lift some 1.3 million out of poverty, at the same time, 1.3 million jobs would be lost — in the mid-range scenario. And 3.7 million jobs would be lost in the worst-case scenario. This is even giving Democrats pause. But what is even missing from this analysis is how many would benefit from minimizing govern- ment interference in the market- place altogether, rather than gov- ernment stepping in and manip- ulating and distorting the mar- ketplace. The bread and butter of Dem- ocratic politicians is convincing voters that they can make their lives better by expanding gov- ernment and getting it more in- volved in private lives. But data convincingly shows that the most prosperous nations are the ones with the freest econ- This was the last leg of our tour before heading back to the US. Never in my life did I have plans to visit another place so far from home and so rather different. Well, as the saying goes, you only live once. Might as well. So we left the Philippines for an eight hour flight to Dubai, one of the seven states in the United Ar- ab Emirates. Why that place? Because several of my Filipino friends recommended visiting that area for two things: see the tallest building in the world and see how much construction of exotic and big buildings is going on. So here we go. As we landed in the airport and exit from the plane, it felt like a sensation you get when you open your oven while checking on how well the turkey is cooking. It was 104 degrees Fahr- enheit and it did not feel good. I thought to myself this might have been a mistake. But since I knew the country is loaded with mullah and have all the needed electrical power to make life comfortable, I felt comforted. Yes indeed, every- where you go and ev- eryplace you visit is cool, thank goodness for air conditioning. How about water since it's a desert nation? No problem, they have an abundance of it since they have superb desalinization systems and plants to produce fresh water from the ocean. I did not care which ocean it was. Every- where you go bottled water is su- perabundant and they always say: "Drink lots of water, we have lots and lots of them." The hotel we stayed at was owned by investors from the coun- try of India, so the atmosphere was Indian and the cuisine for break- fast had flavors from that country. Oh yes, there were plenty of tour- ists staying in that hotel from that country too. When we registered at the front desk, we were greet- ed by a lady wearing their Indian native custom, she carried a plate with several candles and decorat- ed with flowers, we were given a neck- lace to wear for "Good Luck." Immediately, we were served a red colored drink to re- fresh and cool down our achy bodies from the long flight. Wow, I was think- ing I hope these ges- tures of luxury do not end. • • • So now, we went to our room to relax and freshen up, it was the 23rd floor of the building. I could see many parts of the city from the large window. Wow, the view showed so many megastructures each competing to outdo each other in design and height. I wondered how could they afford this? Duh. They have the money flow- ing from all over the western and Asian world from oil revenues. We are in a season of centenni- als of Prohibition-related events, from the 1917 vote by the U.S. Sen- ate to submit the Constitutional Amendment to the state legisla- tures for ratification, to its even- tual repeal in 1933. I grew up hearing Prohibition dismissed as a doomed, quixot- ic attempt by over-religious back- woods meddlers to interfere in the private conduct of people whose in- genuity and staying power the re- formers had badly underestimat- ed. But I'm not so sure about that anymore. For one thing, the longing to free our people from the shackles of substance abuse was not exclu- sively religious. The 18th Amend- ment was one of five Progres- sive amendments passed within a 10 -year period. It shared overlap- ping support with the amendments to enact a federal income tax, and to give women the vote. Prohibition didn't outlaw the consumption of alcohol, but its sale. It is analogous to laws against human trafficking, which do not outlaw humans. The opposition was formida- ble, beginning with government itself. Woodrow Wilson vetoed the Volstead Act, which enforced the Constitutional amendment, but the House of Representatives overturned his veto the same day, and the Senate did so on the fol- lowing day. Wilson cited arcane technical objections, but the father of the federal income tax almost certain- ly was alarmed by the revenue im- pact of Prohibition. At the turn of the 20th Century, the U.S. govern- ment drew one third of its income from taxes on liquor. This was on par with the Ro- manov monarchs' treasury in pre- Communist Russia, where about one third of royal treasury came from the pathological alcoholism of the miserable Russian peasant- ry. "Death is preferable to selling vodka," the atheist Vladimir Len- in declared during the Revolu- tion there, which he waged dur- ing roughly the same period as the U.S. movement for Prohibition. Gandhi agreed with Lenin that alcohol was a tool of the ruling class for control over the poor and the colonized. No less than the British opium merchants, alcohol manufacturers worked hand-in- glove with colonial powers to re- duce indigenous communities to passive dependency, indifferent to the resulting crime and fami- ly destruction. Gandhi's struggle against British colonialism was in part a struggle for sobriety. "The one thing most deplorable next to Untouchability," he wrote in 1925, "is the drink curse." At his urging, the Congress Party adopt- ed alcohol prohibition as a high pri- ority, and it was ultimately written into the first Indian Constitution in 1949. "From South A frica to Egypt to Istanbul," Villanova professor Mark Schrad wrote in the Wash- ington Post, "prohibition became synonymous with anti-imperialism and self-determination." The hard-drinking British im- perialist Winston Churchill didn't take Prohibition lightly, and wrote in 1929 of his disdain for our com- bination of moralism and "the rat- trap rigidity of the American Con- stitution" that produced a gigan- tic "spectacle at once comic and pathetic." Such haughty and cavalier elit- ism ultimately prevailed over ear- nest American democracy, with the help of enormous immigrant populations including some of my ancestors. German-American beer manu- facturers could have funded an ag- gressive resistance to enactment of the Prohibition amendment, but were on their best behavior immediately following World War I. They bided their time and grad- ually undermined support for the law over the next decade. Other ethnic groups consid- ered alcohol indispensable to their group identity or personal autono- my, and did their bit to doom the experiment. They abused the litur- gical wine exception. They bought The definition of a Christian na- tion in the last century was "A na- tion that embraces the ethical and moral teachings of Jesus Christ." No nation through history has declared itself a Christian Nation and embraced a theocratic gov- ernment. Given John Calvin and the city, fathers at Geneva, Swit- zerland attempted it, but that was more of a city-state than a nation. Moving to our era most would agree the nations of Christendom, which is Europe and the Americas, have as late discarded the centu- ries of Christ centered morality and have replaced it with social justice. The sound of "Social Justice" to the Christian would on the surface be an acceptable goal. Who would not want to see the ills of society remedied, such as poverty, racism, and bigotry? However, social justice as prac- ticed demands equal outcomes, which is not possible. Humani- ty is diverse with a wide range of abilities across every spectrum of life. How do you make the "playing field" in any aspect of life equal or fair, when not all the possible par- ticipants are equal in a particular attribute? In non-professional sports, a handicap is assigned to make play some- what equal-but sports are not real life in that they produce nothing but entertainment, and no one has yet to invent a way to eat entertain- ment by the masses. It does not take long to realize for social jus- tice to occur the levers and power of government must be employed to bring about the desired result of equal outcome for all. What is left out of the discussion is what moral and ethical founda- tion is the demand for social jus- tice based upon? A sophomore so- ciology major knows there are in- equalities in life and regardless of social structure, there will al- ways be. As more than one columnists has observed, when the power to promote social change is given to government, the power of develop- ing despotism is also given. America, in spite of what the latest crop of social warriors' be- lieves, thrived upon the founda- tions of Christian morality. Given no people or nation produced a utopian society, across time social ills are identi- fied and changes oc- cur; But this takes time. When govern- ment interferes and change is forced, in- stitutional change results, but the root cause is driven under- ground-or the issue is not solved but the outcome is deferred to lat- er. Historians who do not wor- ship Lincoln point out that slav- ery was a dying institution and was not sustainable. Slavery was a capital-intensive system of labor, which could not compete with the onrushing industrial revolution. Therefore, the Civil War was un- necessary. A greater threat to daily life in America is Open Borders. Just to venture into the issue makes one a racist by social justice definition, but I disagree. The majority of immigrants to