Socialism in Action

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/nyregion/14hunger.html?hpw   "The South Bronx, Plagued by Obesity, Tops a Hunger Survey" You've got to love a headline like that! How did they determine these denizens are hungry? Well, they asked them whether they were short of food money at least once in the last year. In America, answering yes is sufficient to define you as hungry--at least, under socialist lights. Who believes this crap? It's not enough that we feed these morons with food stamps and free school lunch and breakfast--now they want us to subsidize the healthy items of their free food--since they cannot make intelligent decisions for themselves. They do not have healthy foods in these areas because businesses cannot make money selling what people do not want. It's no accident that this area is entirely overrun with blacks, puerto ricans, and dominicans--the third world imported to America and put on welfare because they cannot function in a first world society. The socialists know this--they will not say they know it, but their actions betray the knowledge. An eloquent British perspective on this issue, fortified with "knowledge by acquaintance": https://www.city-journal.org/html/starving-criminal-12383.html Excerpts: The existence of malnutrition in the midst of plenty has not entirely escaped either the intelligentsia or the government, which of course is proposing measures to combat it: but, as usual, neither pols nor pundits wish to look the problem in the face or make the obvious connections. For them, the real and most pressing question raised by any social problem is: “How do I appear concerned and compassionate to all my friends, colleagues, and peers?” Needless to say, the first imperative is to avoid any hint of blaming the victim by examining the bad choices that he makes. It is not even permissible to look at the reasons for those choices, since by definition victims are victims and therefore not responsible for their acts, unlike the relatively small class of human beings who are not victims....He feels the need to retreat into impersonal abstractions, into structures or alleged structures over which the victim has no control. And out of this need to avoid the rawness of reality he spins utopian schemes of social engineering. The British intelligentsia has thus come up with an abstraction that fits this particular bill perfectly—that is to say, the need to explain widespread malnutrition in the midst of plenty without resort to the conduct of the malnourished themselves: food deserts....The only homes in which there were ever any signs of genuine cookery and of eating as a social activity, where families discussed the topics of daily life and affirmed their bonds to one another, were those of the Indian immigrants. In white and black homes, cookery meant (at its best) re-heating in a microwave oven, and there was no table round which people could sit together to eat the re-heated food. Meals here were solitary, poor, nasty, British, and short....The Indian immigrants and their descendants inherited a far better and more elaborate cuisine than the native British, of course, but this is not a sufficient explanation of their willingness still to buy fresh food and to cook it: they continue to cook because they still live in families, and cookery is a socially motivated art. Even among Indian heroin addicts (principally Muslim), the kind of malnutrition I have described is rare, because they do not yet live in the solipsistic isolation of their white counterparts, who live alone, even when there are other people inhabiting the house or apartment in which they themselves live....If food deserts truly exist—and they cannot in these times of easy transport be very extensive—the explanation lies in demand, not in supply. And demand is a cultural phenomenon... The connections I have drawn are obvious, yet denied—or rather avoided altogether—in the typical modern British approach to social problems... The liberal intelligentsia has several reasons for failing to see or admit the cultural dimension of malnutrition in the midst of plenty—in failing to see its connection with an entire way of life—and in throwing the blame instead onto the supermarket chains. One reason is to avoid confronting the human consequences of the changes in morals, manners, and social policy that it has consistently advocated. The second is to avoid all appearance of blaming people whose lives are poor and unenviable. That this approach leads it to view those same people as helpless automata, in the grip of forces that they cannot influence, let alone control—and therefore as not full members of the human race—does not worry the intelligentsia in the least. On the contrary, it increases the importance of the elite’s own providential role in society. To blame the supermarket chains is implicitly to demand that the liberal and bureaucratic elite should have yet more control over society. This is how the British government’s current Food Poverty Eradication Bill should be interpreted. By attempting to tackle the sources of supply rather than those of demand, it will sidestep the question of an entire way of life—a problem that it would take genuine moral courage to tackle—and aim at an easy target instead. The government will increase bureaucracy and regulation without reducing malnutrition. This, in miniature, is the story of modern Britain.