Do Gooders Run Amuck

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About twenty years ago my friend Tom Nickeson was raising prize-winning sheep on his farm along Stoney Fork Road outside Wellsboro in Tioga County. On a clear but bitter cold day an impatient series of knocks on the front door interrupted Tom, who was taking a well-deserved nap between midday chores.

At the door stood three folks with judgmental frowns on their faces who,without
introducing themselves, began chastising Tom for his " irresponsible treatment of sheep". How dare he leave them out in a "hostile environment".

Tom displayed far more tact and diplomacy than I would have been capable of. He
smiled and offered to accompany the trio to the pasture and watch them attempt to herd the ewes and lambs back into the barn but, "They’re only going to return to the pasture as soon as you leave" Tom explained. " The door between the barn and the pasture is always left open." Without so much as an apology for disturbing Tom, the trio turned on their heels and left the Nickeson farm in a huff. Nothing was learned by those dogooders run amuck.

This amusing but true story is the perfect metaphor for what appears to be happening in our society today. Well intentioned liberals, acting as do-gooders, inadvertently hurt those they claim to help( as well as the rest of us). Let’s do a quick seventy-year review of American history to demonstrate how we’ve slid down this slippery slope toward Socialism:

In 1942 the Japanese people had asked their military where the bombers of the
Doolittle raid on Tokyo came from. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had impishly
replied, " They came from Shangri-La"( the imaginary paradise on earth made famous by the literary classic, Lost Horizon). By 1945 Roosevelt, exhausted and dying, seriously envisioned the creation of an American Shangri-La. He felt that with the defeat of the Axis powers a new era was about to dawn on this great nation. He publicly announced that every American would soon be guaranteed health care, home ownership, food, clothing, and full employment. This was in contrast to our founding fathers who only envisioned freedom as our sole guarantee. Ironically that guarantee seems to be waning today.

A series of presidents followed F.D.R. with a more pragmatic view. Presidents’ Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy worked hard to improve our standard of living but kept a wary eye on our national pocketbook as well as recognize the nature of man. Enter President Lyndon Banes Johnson, who idealized F.D.R.’s philosophy. Johnson’s ill- fated War on Poverty opened the Pandora’s Box of government handouts rather than providing a helping hand up. Two hundred years of American tradition of upward social mobility was inadvertently,badly damaged.

Before the War on Poverty each generation of working poor had always taken low-level jobs to climb out of poverty and provide a better future for their children. Now, under Johnson’s strategy, throwing federal money at the problem inadvertently created an illegal alien epidemic and a perpetual class of government dependency. An alarming number citizens opted to go on the dole rather than follow the more difficult model taken by their ancestors. The illegals filled the vacuum in the level entry workforce.

Careerists in Congress, on both sides of the aisle, turned a blind eye rather than endanger their reelection.

Further down the historical road came the Fannie May and Freddie Mac debacle. This boondoggle was created by well intentioned do-gooders who fantasized home ownership for everyone without the practical means of repayment. The architects of this financial disaster were Cris Dodd and Barney Frank who played a major role in creating our national debt bomb. Cris and Barney to this day won’t acknowledge their mistake and have already bailed out of Congress with their golden parachutes provided by John Q, Taxpayer. May they perpetually get lumps in their mashed potatoes.

Under the Obama Administration do-gooders continue to promote an ineffective war on hunger and malnutrition that has failed to eliminate either. Currently a record number of people are collecting the modern equivalent of food stamps. In addition, the taxpayer provides breakfast as well as lunch in a growing number of our public schools. Despite these well intentioned efforts we are reminded by daily public service announcements that one in four children in our country still go to bed hungry. Ironically, these announcements encourage involvement in private efforts to solve the problem, a methodology that historically had a better rate of return on investment than government programs.

Are we learning anything from the attempts by government to micromanage society
towards Shangri-La? Only time will tell but evidence rather than wishful thinking isn’t encouraging.

The people who harassed Tom Nickeson about his sheep didn’t understand animal
behavior, nor did they learn from their mistake or admit their error . Like those well intentioned folks, today’s social engineering do-gooders are also running amuck.

Stratton Schaeffer
Retired Engineer & Farmer
October, 2013