The Wall Street Journal’s lead editorial today focuses on Barack Obama and the radical pressure group ACORN. It’s important reading.
ACORN has a long history of voter fraud and allegations are swirling around all over the country right now. These are people who are perfectly comfortable using government coercion to achieve their ideological goals (such as “affordable housing” and the editorial notes ACORN’s leading role in the mortgage mess we’re now in) and living at the expense of others through tax dollars sent to them by friendly politicians. That they would have any scruples about the honesty of elections is utterly implausible.
One of Obama’s campaign promises is a $4000 per year federal subsidy for college provided that the student does 100 hours of “public service” work. Anyone want to bet that working for ACORN (and other ideological groups) would qualify?
The best way to help poor people is to allow capitalism to work, but many American cities (Detroit is a good example) are hostile to free enterprise and entrepreneurship. The ACORN mentality, however, is to use yet more government coercion to improve things for the poor. There wouldn’t be any money or glory in trying to do away with burdensome licensing regulations, for example.
Thought experiment — what if instead of capitalism, Hong Kong had been run on the lines of ACORN’s socialistic philosophy for the last 60 years? How wealthy would the people there be?
One of the truly frightening things about the prospect of an Obama administration is that it would probably be loaded with people who share the anti-capitalistic mentality of ACORN.
