People can improve without Big Brother

A while back Bill Cosby made news for chiding black parents for not being responsible enough with their kids’ education. Stop buying them huge speakers, start buying them books, he urged.

This made sense because it does appear that when one is surrounded with even a modest library in one’s youth, one is more likely than not to get used to books, even read some, without parents having to badger one about this.

It worked in my youth. I was never told to read, unlike I was constantly forced to play sports — but the apartment where we lived had a substantial library. I fell in love with the books but rebelled against the relentless push to be athletic. While one swallow does not a springtime make, this is more than just one case — I have found my own and most other children responding much better to gentle or subtle than to harsh or fierce urgings.

Alas, the idea that there is anything poor blacks could do other than what they are actually doing is anathema to modern liberals. They love the idea that the poor, black or white or whatever are simply helpless and in desperate need not of mustering initiative but, you guessed it, government programs.

So Cosby had to be placated.

Ah, but Cosby is black, so charging him with the vice of racism would not work too well. It could carry no punch with which to silence what he suggested, namely, that black parents can and ought to straighten up their parental acts. Had his words been spoken by some prominent white commentator, that ploy would still have been appealing to the modern liberal establishment. Call the messenger a racist and thus squash the truth about what parents can and should do for their kids.

But what to do now, when a prominent black figure delivers this piece of sensible insight? How can it be squelched, neutralized so we can keep going to government to answers?

Come to the rescue The New York Times, via the “Editorial Observer,” one Brent Staples (May 29). The problem with Bill Cosby isn’t that he is white — no, it’s that he belongs to the upper black classes. The class card, thus, takes the place of the race card.

Mind you, ever since the 19th century, the class card has been a potent weapon by those who loved the state, who would have government resurrected to its previously prominent place of the ruler and the caretaker of the realm.

That used to be the role of benevolent monarchs — or so the story was told to rationalize the monarchy. But monarchs had become discredited by too obviously drifting toward despotism, with not much benevolence in what they did as the top-down rulers of countries. So the new idea was that all the oppression perpetrated by the upper classes against the lower classes didn’t simply require busting up the entrenched, legally protected class system. No, instead it became fashionable to promote the notion that some kind of benevolent people’s government could bring about the process of equalization.

That this simply made that government grossly unequal and perpetuated the institution of a ruling class — this time consisting of politicians and bureaucrats — didn’t phase the advocates. After all, they were going to be the ones who made up this new class. They were going to be the intelligentsia in service of the people, via the state.

Once again this reactionary nonsense is dished out for us in The Times in hopes our envy of the well off will bring us on board and get us to join in the class warfare. Bill Cosby, who clearly cannot be charged with being a racist, can now be dismissed because he is part of the upper black class.

That, of course, fixes his mind in a way that isn’t worth any of our attention. And the class card gambit may help continue the notion that the poor, especially the black poor, cannot fend for themselves, cannot become better parents, cannot help with the improvement of the children’s future.

So, goes the refrain, “We need the government, after all.”

Let’s not fall for this new trick, please. And let us not accept the insulting notion about poor blacks, but heed Cosby’s idea that black folks — any folks — can and ought to do something about what ails them.

Tibor Machan advises Freedom Communications,

parent company of this newspaper. E-mail him at:

[email protected]