Dear Dr. Alan Mark Grayson:
I have started arriving at the conclusion that you have a reasoning deficiency, in spite of your advanced degrees and studies in economics, law, and government. I watched your
youtube rebuke of the inspector general of the Federal reserve, and loved your persistence in getting at the truth of Fed debt on and off the balance sheet. That stands in stark, and I would say hypocritical, contrast to your attitude regarding utterly wasting money on work that rightly belongs to third-world governments. On 04/13/2011 03:31 PM, you wrote to me this message authorized by the committee to reelect Alan Grayson:
Dear Robert,
In Washington, DC, the leaders of both parties are celebrating. "Woo-hoo, we made a deal! Isn't that great?!"
Well, it depends on the deal.
There is one particular part of the federal budget that I've been following closely for the past couple of weeks. Since March 30th. When Rajiv Shah, the head of the US Agency for International Development, testified that Republican budget cuts would kill 70,000 children
"We estimate, and I believe these are very conservative estimates, that H.R. 1 [the original Republican budget proposal] would lead to 70,000 kids dying," he said.
"Of that 70,000, 30,000 would come from malaria control programs that would have to be scaled back specifically. The other 40,000 is broken out as [follows:] 24,000 would die because of a lack of support for immunizations and other investments, and 16,000 would [die] because of a lack of skilled attendants at birth."
Now, admittedly, all these children deliberately chose to be born outside the United States. To make things worse, they selected parents living in poverty. And, of course, most of them have brown skin.
Dr. Grayson, you have misplaced your sarcasm. The children's parents engaged in unwise procreation. We should not pay for their mistake, which they will repeat. The parents' government wasted its resources on graft and corruption. It could have spent those resources wisely to limit procreation by parents unable to care for their children effectively. Therefore, the parents and government in third world lands created the problem, and ultimately only they can solve it. The conditions they live in will ultimately kill them prematurely anyway, through no fault of ours, whether the USA spends money on them or not.
Notwithstanding all that, I would very much prefer to see these children alive. Maybe it's just me, but it disturbs me to think that 70,000 innocent children will die in pain from malaria or some other horrible disease, or die at birth because no one in the neighborhood happens to know how to perform an episiotomy.
Not to mention the mothers. Among women, at the time when my mother was born, the second leading cause of death was birth. Childbirth, specifically. That's still true in some other parts of the world.
I share your sentiments. With all your education do you have even a vague clue as to the CAUSE of the problem? Have you not learned by now that you cannot heal a cancer tumor by putting a band-aide on it? Feeding and medicating those children will result in government waste and theft of the aid we give, as it always does. And that will not fix either the corrupt government or the incompetence and irresponsibility of the parents.
After I heard about Shah's testimony, I looked up the bill he was referring to, H.R. 1. It's true. In Title XI of the bill, the section on the State Department and Foreign Operations appropriations, there are big cuts.
Then yesterday, when the Republicans posted their new budget bill H.R. 1473 online, I looked that up, too. And, starting on Page 364, I saw big cuts in the State Department and Foreign Operations appropriations. Not quite as big as H.R. 1. But still big.
Personally, I'd like to know how many children H.R. 1473 is going to kill. But no one in Washington, DC is likely to provide that figure, because the leaders of both parties are so busy celebrating the "compromise."
I'll answer that question for you: ZERO. We kill no one by refusing to fund foreign programs to feed, clothe, medicate, or educate the feckless people whose governemnts will continue the policies that put the children in harm's way to begin with. When you devise a way to prevent the births of such children, THEN you will have devised an actual solution.
But there is no compromise, there is no middle ground, between life and death.
What's your point?
The record for human sacrifice was established in 1487, by the Aztecs. Aztec priests slaughtered 80,000 prisoners of war, to celebrate their new temple. (The event was loosely portrayed in Mel Gibson's 2006 movie Apocalypto.)
How do you equate refusal to waste money saving kids who will die young anyway with MURDERING them to appease a pagan god? Did you recently suffer a bad bump on the head?
So no matter how many children H.R. 1473 may kill, it won't set a record. At most, it will earn the silver medal for cruelty.
It would do neither. Do you hope your histrionics will make readers feel guilty for refusing to give grossly unfounded foreign aid that will end up doing little if any good, and will actually perpetuate corrupt governments and procreation of more feckless people?
I just wish that someone, in either party, would make the case that the federal budget is not simply 500 pages of large numbers. It also represents our collective effort to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and heal the sick. To help people accomplish whatever it is that they can accomplish in life, unburdened and undefeated by poverty, bigotry, hunger, unemployment, disease, racism, sexism and ignorance. Our collective effort to fulfill the last four words of the Pledge of Allegiance: "and justice for all."
Ain't that America?
Courage,
Alan Grayson
Clearly, you want to remove the Law of the Survival of the Fittest, and make certain the least fit survive well on our nickel IN FOREIGN LANDS. Show me the provision in the Constitution authorizing THAT profligate waste of American taxpayer money.
I want to treat this issue in a little more detail.
First of all, most of the 70,000 children who might die of malaria, disease, and bad midwifing would do so because of corruption of their governments and incompetence of their parents. Americans have, therefore, NO responsibility for the lives of those children. YOU have no right to force Americans to dole out such charity against their will just because YOU feel sad when you visualize all those children dying. If YOU want to give YOUR money for such causes, do so, but leave everyone else's alone. Congress has no business considering such an expenditure at all.
However, America does have world responsibilities tied to its responsibilities at home. Before the USA spends another penny feeding, clothing, or housing the poor, it should spend a thousand times more on projects that prevent poverty, homelessness, starvation, and disease. It can accomplish this only one way: by cleaning up America's gene pool, not by paying for the dramatic problems that result from failure to clean it up.
America then might take responsibility for eliminating foreign oligarchies that oppress their populations.
Furthermore, America's leaders should take note of the negative impact upon the world gene pool of all efforts to save foreign children as you suggest. Saving those children will cause a proliferation of the unfit, and that will pose an even greater burden on your misguided altruism.
Apparently, most enlightened governments, even ours, see this point clearly. For example, why hasn't the USA done more to protect the people ravaged by genocidal conflicts in Darfur, the Congo, and Rwanda? Simple. It makes no sense to save grossly inferior populations from killing one another off. Such an effort provides zero benefit for the world and only minimal, temporary benefit for the saved, for they will die young anyway.
Bottom line, YOU have conflicting, hypocritical loyalties, and it shows in your incessantly wasteful effort to save those who oughtn't to exist at all, railing against it as "human sacrifice."
A HUGE DIFFERENCE exists between the abject insanity of intentionally murdering people to appease God and letting them go through the normal course of life and death as a consequence of corruption and incompetence of their own governments and countrymen. You seem to have forgotten that charity begins at home and many thousands of Americans die every year because of incompetence and neglect of medical practitioners, abusive law enforcement and criminal justice systems, incorrigibly avaricious lenders, and some combination of ignorance, stupidity, and intransigent recalcitrance of its people.
But that does not constitute our only problem. You don't seem to have a clue that America contains at least 75,000,000 relatively "stupid" people - IQ below 85; lacking the cognitive ability to graduate from high school or compete for the better jobs and mates, having profoundly low value of productivity, and dumbing down the nation as the years roll by. Government, instead of curbing this, invites more through a flawed, failed, and badly enforced immigration system. These people procreate more of their kind - statistically bad genes cause stupidity. The stupid procreate at a far greater rate than people of higher intelligence. They become wards of the state, parasites that suck the fruits of productivity from smarter Americans through welfare abuse and crime. Society wastes education beyond a 7th grade level on them. They impose a monumental burden on infrastructures like welfare, health care, criminal justice, prisons, schools, and the neighborhoods they convert to slums by neglect.
According to Lynn and VanHanen's update on
IQ and the Wealth of Nations in
IQ and Global Inequality average IQ of a nation correlates highly with GDP. US IQ = 98; Subsaharan Africa IQ = 70. Psychometrists refer to 70 as the highest IQ of "morons." Equatorial Guinea has an IQ of 59. 33 million Caucasians, 19 million blacks, and 23 million non-white Hispanics have IQ below 85 in the USA. That sits a full standard deviation higher than the IQ of
Such low IQ people cannot create or maintain an advanced civilization, and put into one, they will soon destroy it, as has begun to happen in the USA.
Worst of all, we let them vote. IF and WHEN they vote, they most likely will vote for people like you because of your apparent inclination to hand them the wealth of others which you took at gunpoint.
Americans should have continued demanding eugenics techniques to improve the gene pool. Instead, they and "political correctness" caused the states to eliminate all eugenics laws.
Now, people like you whine that the Fed wastes money on bad loans and the Congress wastes money undeclared (and therefore illegal) foreign wars against governments that abuse their people, smart and stupid alike. YOU complain that we don't waste that money abroad saving the lives of children who, sad to say, should die as a lesson to the world about the rewards of bad government and incompetent or irresponsible, inferior parents.
You want to put a band-aide on a cancer, the rot of bad genes that ONLY EUGENICS or genocide will cure. No sane person wants genocide. But
only the socially
INSANE think eugenics a bad idea. Such people, having forgotten the lessons of science in improving crop yield and quality, might as well yearn for the return of the Neanderthal.
Let us look your hypocrisy straight in the eye, Dr. Grayson.
You won't spend a penny preventing the problem of stupidity that gave rise to and perpetuates corrupt third world governments which abuse, neglect, and encourage procreation of more of their feckless citizens.
But you'll spend a fortune making the problem even worse, that is, saving the lives of children who, if they make it to adulthood, will procreate more of their kind.
Meanwhile, you'll ignore the very same problem that threatens to turn the USA itself into a third-world nation.
From your apparent viewpoint, we face a rather simple dilemma here:
- Spend money saving stupid foreign children who will grow into stupid adults and, because of our interference with the laws of nature, and create an even worse problem by procreating more like them.
or
- Do precisely the same in the USA.
You probably don't even see or consider a saner, intelligent alternative that really will solve the problem:
- Spend money fostering benign eugenics programs that
- curtail procreation of the stupid, inferior, and unfit, who destroy civilization, and
- encourage procreation of the average and bright who will improve and expand an advanced civilization.
If people with IQ below 85 in the USA stop procreating, within two generations we will have increased the average IQ of the USA significantly, possibly by 15 or more points. That will have an astounding, POSITIVE impact on our GDP. And it will increase the
effective GDP even more by reducing the drain on our economy and infrastructures caused by "stupidity." Then we will have more money to afford helping other nations by implementing similar programs there.
You fail to see that by improving the average intelligence of a population through benign eugenics, you give people the raw tools to escape any and all need for government to take care of them. They could take care of themselves WITHOUT assistance by government or anybody else, foreign OR domestic.
We then will feel no moral pressure to hold guns to the heads of citizens in "
our collective effort to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, and heal the sick." We will leave Jesus' exhortation for his followers to love and serve one another to personal charity, RATHER THAN considering it a MANDATE for GOVERNMENT to FORCE EVERYONE ELSE show charity to the undeserving. Government owes no such obligation either to its own people or to the people of foreign lands.
To use government in such a blighted effort amounts to nothing more robbing from the responsible, sensible middle class and giving to the irresponsible, unsensible poor. From my point of view, ONLY the poor and fools who believe it won't cost them much personally would ever promote such a socialistic scheme. Charity has an intensely personal nature. No one and no government has the right to command it at gunpoint.
