Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 112, No. 317, Ed. 1 Tuesday, June 14, 2016 Page: 6 of 18
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OPINION
6A
Tuesday, June 14, 2016
Denton Record-Chronicle
Denton Record-Chronicle
People need
challenges
to live lives
more fully
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Published by Denton Publishing Co.,
a subsidiary of A.H. Belo Corporation
S| Founded from weekly newspapers,
■ the Denton Chronicle, established in 1882,
^3 and the Denton Record, established in 1897.
Published daily as the Denton
Record-Chronicle since Aug. 3,1903.
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EDITORIAL BOARD
Bill Patterson
Publisher and CEO
Scott K. Parks
Managing Editor
Mark Finley
City Editor
Mariel Tarn-Ray
News Editor
PAST PUBLISHERS
William C. “Will” Edwards
1903-1927
Robert J. “Bob” Edwards
1927-1945
Riley Cross
1945-1970
Vivian Cross
1970-1986
Fred Patterson
1986-1999
oo many social problems are con-
ceived of in terms of what “we” can do
for “them.” After decades of massive
expansions of the welfare state, the answer
seems to range from “not very much” to
“making matters worse.”
Undaunted, people in a number of coun-
tries are coming up
with new proposals
that are variations on
the theme of govern-
ment-provided
come —
amounts to relieving
people from personal
responsibility.
Yet even some con-
servatives and libertar-
ians are coming up
with proposals for
more “efficient” versions of the welfare state
— namely direct cash grants for life to virtu-
ally all adults, instead of the current hodge-
podge of overlapping bureaucratic pro-
grams.
Charles Murray recognizes that “some
people will idle away their lives” under his
proposal. “But that is already a problem,” he
says, and therefore is no valid objection to re-
placing the current welfare state with a less
costly alternative.
Everyone recognizes that there are some
people unable to provide for their own sur-
vival — infants and the severely disabled,
among others.
But providing for such people is wholly
different from a blanket guarantee for every-
body that they need not lift a finger to feed,
clothe or shelter themselves. The financial
cost of providing such a guarantee, though
huge, is not the worst of the problems.
The history of what has actually hap-
pened in times and places where people were
relieved from the challenge of survival by
windfall gains is not encouraging.
In both England and the United States,
the massive expansion of the welfare state
since the 1960s has been accompanied by a
vast expansion in the amount of crime, vio-
lence, drug addiction, fatherless children
and other signs of social degeneration.
Maybe that was just coincidence. But
there have been too many coincidences in
too many very different times and places
where people were relieved from the chal-
lenge of survival by windfall gains of one sort
or another.
In 16th and 17th century Spain — its
“golden age” — the windfall gain was gold
and silver looted by the ton from Spanish col-
onies in the Western Hemisphere. This en-
abled Spain to survive without having to de-
velop the skills, the sciences or the work ethic
of other countries in Western Europe.
Spain couldbuywhat it wanted from oth-
er nations with all the gold and silver taken
from its colonies. As a Spaniard of that era
proudly put it, “Everyone serves Spain and
Spain serves no one.”
What this meant in practical terms was
that other countries developed the skills, the
knowledge, the self-discipline and other
forms of human capital that Spain did not
have to develop, since it could receive the
tangible products of this human capital from
other countries.
But once the windfall gains from its colo-
nies were gone, Spain became, and re-
mained, one of the poorest countries in
Western Europe. Worse, the disdainful atti-
tudes toward productive work that devel-
oped during the centuries of Spain’s golden
age became a negative legacy to future gener-
ations, in both Spain itself and in its overseas
offshoot societies in Latin America.
In Saudi Arabia today, the great windfall
gain is its vast petroleum reserve. This has
spawned both a fabulously wealthy ruling
elite and a heavily subsidized general popu-
lation in which many have become disdain-
ful of work. The net result has been a work
force in which foreigners literally outnumber
Saudis.
Some welfare states’ windfall gains have
enabled a large segment of their own citizens
to live in subsidized idleness while many jobs
stigmatized as “menial” are taken over by for-
eigners. Often these initially poor foreigners
rise up the economic scale, while the subsi-
dized domestic poor fail to rise.
Do we really want more of that?
British historian Arnold Toynbee pro-
posed the “challenge and response” thesis
that human beings advance when there are
challenges they must meet. The welfare state
removes challenges — and has produced
many social retrogressions.
Those with the welfare state vision often
want to remove challenges even from games
by getting rid of winning and losing. That is
consistent with their overall assumptions
about life. But it seems very inconsistent for
conservatives and libertarians to support
plans whose net effect would be to reduce the
inherent challenges of life for still more peo-
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Editorials published in the Denton Record-Chronicle
are determined by the editorial board.
Questions and suggestions should be directed to the:
Denton Record-Chronicle
314 E. Hickory St., Denton, TX 76201
Phone: 940-387-3811
Fax: 940-566-6888
E-mail: drc@dentonrc.com
» r i **
POLITICS MAhaS
m-
which
Campaign 2016 turns
into a Twitter fight
ll
Thomas
Sowell
ahbelo.com NYSE symbol: AHC
Editorial
s presumptive Republican nominee
Donald Trump got into a Twitter fight
with newly crowned presumptive
Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, any
hope for reasoned discourse in Campaign
2016 seemed to fly out the window.
“Obama just endorsed Crooked Hillary”
tweeted Trump, lead-
ing the tweeting as he
does daily. “He wants
four more years of Oba-
ma — but nobody else
does!”
But I’m not a candidate. Clinton did the
A
smarter thing by refusing to dwell one milli-
second longer than necessary on Trump’s
Twitter turf. Just sting and go. Leave a sharp
message that Trump should not go anywhere
near Bill and Hillary Clinton’s scandals unless
he’s ready to face a new dredging up of his own
scandals, old and new.
Besides, Clinton shouldn’t have to do that
dirty workherself. Like most mortals, she is an
amateur at the art ofbuHymgmsult-dogtactics
compared to Trump — and that’s not a bad
thing.
We must resolve not
to accept shootings
ow do we even begin to sort out what happened
early Sunday morning at a gay nightclub in Orlan-
do, Florida? What does it mean to us here in Den-
ton County? Are we destined to be nothing more than
innocent witnesses to these tragedies? Or can we do
something?
The massacre at the Pulse nightclub raises so many
issues that it boggles the mind. The shooter took 49 lives
with an AR-15 assault-style rifle and a handgun. He
pledged allegiance to the Islamic state, though it’s not
clear whether IS had any hand in directing his merciless
attack on the primarily crowd gathered in the gay night-
club shortly after 2 a.m.
Wrapped like a puzzle in this single tragedy are issues
surrounding gun control, sexual identity, immigration
policy, mental illness and Muslim radicals who murder
people.
Let’s start solving this puzzle by setting a goal. We
resolve to never allow mass shootings to be an accepted
fact of life in the United States. Orlando cannot happen
one day and then be forgotten a week later as if nothing
had happened. Repeating this process like hypnotized
zombies creates a hellish version of groundhog day.
This has to stop.
Anyone who commits mass murder has a mental ill-
ness by definition. This applies to anyone who guns down
innocent people during a sneak attack in a church, movie
theater, elementary school, town hall meeting, San Ber-
nardino office party or in a gay nightclub.
The Orlando shooter, the 50th person to die in Sun-
day’s massacre, provided authorities with plenty of chanc-
es to deal with his illness. He popped up on the FBI’s
radar two times because of his affinity for IS. But he ap-
parently did not do enough to get arrested. Co-workers
also reported that he appeared to be a ticking time bomb.
Still, no one did anything to stop him.
As a society, threats of terrorism have caused us to
re-calibrate the limits of our First Amendment right to
free speech. For example, making jokes about bombs at
an airport security checkpoint can result in prosecution.
What can we do in Denton?
Maybe the answer is for each one of us to take seri-
ously threats of violence instead of writing them off as
harmless rantings of a blowhard. Citizens who hear some-
one talking about killing other people — at a black
church, a concert, a mosque, synagogue or a gay bar —
should report those threats to a law enforcement agency,
which then should prosecute that person for making
terrorist threats.
We’ve got to figure out how to stop people who are
mentally unstable before they commit mass murder. It
won’t be easy. A new level of vigilance will require moth-
ers and fathers to report their angry sons to the police.
Wives will have to report their violent husbands. Friends
will have to report friends instead of keeping quiet and
hoping for the best.
Something has to change. Mass shootings cannot be
written off as the price of American freedom.
H
\
Zingers are what surrogates are for — and
who would have guessed that she would have a
rising star on her side in the personage of Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat
and, like Clinton’s rival candidate Vermont
Sen. Bemie Sanders, a darling of their party’s
Ah, he only wishes
that were true. Every
campaign, it is often
said, is a contest be-
tween “change” versus
“more of the same.”
That’s particularly true
in our current contest Clinton is not only run-
ning toward policies and programs of Presi-
dent Barack Obama, she’s stickingto them like
a life raft in a stormy sea.
And why not? Obama’s approval ratings
have been running higher than Clinton’s or
Trump’s, who both happen to have the lowest
approval ratings of any presumed major-party
candidates in modem history.
Instead, the leading Republicans who
these days are derided as the party “establish-
ment” are in a pickle: They don’t want to run
with Trump if he constantly is going to shoot
from the lip in ways that offend the voters the
GOP is trying to woo — and they can’t run
without him. His antics are too beloved by the
rank-and-file Republicans and right-leaning
independents who turn out for Trump’s rallies.
But let’s get back to the fight This time, on
the day after the Associated Press declared
that she finally had clinched enough delegates
to win her party’s nomination, Clinton joined
in the fun with a short, sweet and stem reply to
Trump: “Delete your account”
Ah, it’s on now. Trump, who dishes out in-
sults better than he takes them, sounded a bit
miffed as he fired back with a mini-rant: “How
long did it take your staff of 823 people to
think that up — and where are your 33,000
emails that you deleted?”
Clinton might well have responded in the
manner I might have chosen: asking, ‘Where
are the tax returns that you refuse to show us?”
Or I might have asked, “Where are the tens
of thousands of dollars in life savings that you
fleeced from customers of the former ‘Trump
University’?”
Clarence
Page
progressive wing.
She stayed neutral during the primaries,
but after Clinton clinched the nomination she
came out swinging in speeches, TV appear-
ances and toe-to-toe with The Donald on
Twitter, calling him a ‘loser,” “weak” and a
“small, insecure money grubber.”
And she’s just getting started. Welcome to
Campaign 2016. It’s not going to be for the
squeamish.
But Clinton hasn’t done badly with the zin-
gers, either. “Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just
different,” she said in her recent foreign policy
address that could have been called her “Stop
Donald” speech, “they are dangerously inco-
herent. They’re not even really ideas, just a se-
ries of bizarre rants, personal feuds and out-
right lies.”
She also raised the possibility that Trump
could lead America into a war because some
foreign leader “got under his very thin skin.”
To which Trump responded in an inter-
view with CNN’s Jake Tapper with a line that
sounded like a parody of his famously self-con-
gratulatory style: ‘Well, I don’t have thin skin,”
Trump protested. “I have very strong and thick
skin.” He went on to explain how his thick skin
and “good temperament” enabled him to have
“one ofthebest-sellingbooks of all-time” and a
successful television show, The, Apprentice.
Of course, he did not mention that his fa-
mous tag line on that show was ‘You’re fired,”
which might not be the sort of message that
voters seeking an upbeat economic message
are looking to hear. But that’s show biz.
CLARENCE PAGE writes for the Chica-
go Tribune. His column is distributed by
Tribune Content Agency.
Letters to the editor
Thanks for arming killers
In the light of the latest mass shooting,
thank you NRA, its vocal members, arms
manufacturers and the members of Con-
gress that bow to this minority. Under the
guise of people’s rights, thank you for effi-
ciently and legally arming home-gown ter-
rorists, drug dealers, gangs, disturbed peo-
ple, disgruntled people and prejudiced peo-
ple of all stripes and religions with the most
efficient killing tools in the world.
These people exist in all countries and so-
cieties, but most don’t feed them with all of
the arms and ammunition they desire with
little or no restrictions. And for all of the
SUBMISSIONS
Letters for publication must include the writer’s
name, address and telephone number. Au-
thorship must be verified before publication.
The Record-Chronicle reserves the right to edit
letters for length.
Letters should be typed or legibly handwritten
and be 250 or fewer words. We prefer email
submissions.
Send to: drc@dentonrc.com.
Otherwise, fax to 940-566-6888, or mail to:
Letters to the editor
P.0. Box 369
Denton, TX 76202
This day in history: June 14
hoodwinked hunters out there who identify
with the NRA and think they are protecting
their rights, ask yourself why these killers
don’t choose guns we can legally hunt with?
The answer is because the pistols and long
guns they choose are made for what they are
designed for, killing people.
In 1934, Max Baer defeated
Primo Camera with an 11th
round TKO to win the world
heavyweight boxing champion-
ship in Long Island City, New
York.
tection of home and family. The sportsman
should be allowed guns that permit him to
hunt or target shoot; but to continue the sale
of assault rifles is to sanction murder.
The National Rifle Association will
scream to the high heavens at this proposal.
They will claim that it violates their Second
Amendment rights.
When the Second Amendment was
penned, a musket fired one round; a far cry
from an assault rifle’s 30-round magazines.
An assault rifle is overkill for home pro-
tection as well as hunting. It’s only purpose is
the taking of human life.
I am not naive enough to think banning
of assault rifles would stop all murder, which
has been a negative social act sense Cain
clobbered Abel and will continue as long as
humans carry hate in their hearts. Banning
of assault rifles will, however, stop blood
flowing from massacres such as the carnage
in Orlando.
Today is Tuesday, June 14,
the 166th day of 2016. There
are 200 days left in the year. This
is Flag Day.
On June14,1777, the Conti-
nental Congress, meeting in
Philadelphia, adopted the origi-
nal design of the Stars and
Stripes, specifying a flag con-
taining thirteen red and white
stripes and thirteen stars.
In 1775, the Continental Ar-
my, forerunner of the United
States Army, was created.
In 1801, former American
Revolutionary War general and
notorious turncoat Benedict Ar-
nold died in London.
In 1922, Warren G. Harding
became the first president heard
on radio, as Baltimore station
WEAR broadcast his speech
dedicating the Francis Scott Key
memorial at Fort McHenry.
In 1940, German troops en-
tered Paris during World War II;
the same day, the Nazis began
transporting prisoners to the
Auschwitz concentration camp
in German-occupied Poland.
In 1943, the U.S. Supreme
Court, in West Virginia State
Board of Education v. Barnette,
ruled 6-3 that children in public
schools could not be forced to
salute the flag of the United
States.
In 1954, President Dwight
D. Eisenhower signed a measure
adding the phrase “under God”
to the Pledge of Allegiance.
— The Associated Press.
Mike Pennington,
Denton
No more assault rifles
Fifty dead at the time of this writing;
more in critical condition may not survive.
The cause? Not a hurricane, tornado or
earthquake, but one deranged man with an
assault rifle.
It matters not if the shooter’s motivation
was a hate crime directed at the sexual ori-
entation of his victims, or an ISIS-inspired
act of terror.
What matters is that we are in a position
to have this foul act repeated as long as as-
sault rifles are on sale to the public.
Every family should be able to own a pis-
tol with a limited ammunition clip for pro-
pie.
THOMAS SOWELL is a senior fellow
at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His column is distributed by
Creators Syndicate Inc. His website is
www.tsowell.com.
John Nance Gamer,
Denton
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Parks, Scott K. Denton Record-Chronicle (Denton, Tex.), Vol. 112, No. 317, Ed. 1 Tuesday, June 14, 2016, newspaper, June 14, 2016; Denton, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1127375/m1/6/?q=%22%22~1: accessed August 15, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .