faith based initiatives
The ONLY thing appealing to me about the “faith based initiatives”
plan is that, pragmatically speaking, private groups (usually faith-
based, but not necessarily) have a track record of getting the job
done, whether it is drug rehab, or reducing recidivism among
inmates, or you name it, that beats the stuffing out of similar
government-sponsored entities. It’s frustrating to see tax dollars
go to wasteful government programming, but as long as government
thinks that it is supposed to be “Momma” to us–that it has to clean
up all the messes that people make–it’s tempting to want to at
least get “more bang for the buck”. That’s the tempting part, but
yeah, on principle (which is what I ought to be about!), it’s
probably bad policy.
And if government stopped acting like Momma–and thus taxes were
massively reduced–people would more likely grab the ball of social
responsibility AND direct those dollars to programs that they deemed
effective. Be nice if the Constitution was actually the law of the
land, now wouldn’t it?
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Osborne: A Contrarian's Guide to Knowing God
Schlossberg: Idols For Destruction
