By: Robert Damon

You may have seen this video clip the great Dr. Thomas Sowell before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GklCBvS-eI – I can tell you that I never tire of it.

Sowell is one of my favorite thinkers and authors, and this fantastic clip demonstrates why.  In it, Dr. Sowell debates then Pennsylvania Secretary of Welfare, Helen O’Bannion, on – not surprisingly – the subject of welfare.

Upon watching this rather elegant deconstruction of the very notion of a welfare program, my evil, greedy, conservative, free market mind was struck with what feels like a great idea.

This idea stems from the point in the discourse where Ms. O’Bannion admits that the problem with the welfare system is not that people will not get jobs after being taken off of welfare (she even states there is data to support this!).  The problem, according to her, is that when a formerly unemployed welfare recipient finally lands a job, he or she will be unable to afford the cost of childcare in addition to their bills.

Huh.  So she thinks welfare recipients aren’t capable, upon receiving a steady paycheck, of dealing with the same financial strains that 95% of American families deal with?  We’ll leave that condescension alone for now.

As I might have mentioned before, I am a conservative and so you can rightly deduce that in-between devising new ways to destroy the environment and increase my carbon footprint, I enjoy holding poor people back from escaping generational poverty.  In lieu of this, and embracing the caricature of conservatives set forth by the likes of Arianna Huffington and George Soros, it is only natural that I would want to take advantage of those who are not as well off as me.  The idea I spoke of before is a golden opportunity to do just that.

This may sound crazy, but roll with me: I am going to open up a privately-owned, affordable day care in low-income areas.

Shocking, right?

You see, I will get to use my deplorable conservative entrepreneurial brain to make money, local people in the area will be hired by me and not need government assistance, and those parents who were afraid of the costs will be able to have someone look after their kids while they go to their own jobs.

Who knows, if the people I hire to work my day care do a good job, I may even offer them jobs at my oil company and bump their pay up to qualify as “rich” in the eyes of Nancy Pelosi.

Okay, let’s get real here.  I am not an insensitive moron.  I realize that people can fall on hard times and need help, and I think that their fellow man has a Christian duty to help as best he or she can.  I also think that the private sector is best and better suited to help those in need.  Churches and private charities know the people they are serving on a personal level so it is only natural that their emotional investment is as big as their financial one.  These people in churches and private charities serve their fellow man because they want to, not because their money is forcibly taken from them.