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Entry: Neocons and the Left: Know Your Enemies Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/neocons_and_the_left_know_your_enemies#2466 Post contents: I don't suggest that the state or anyone else administer a "regime of genetic testing." However, the state should stand aside from all levelling efforts and society should deal with the indigent (including the mentally deficient) as a matter of charity rather than on an egalitarian basis. This is best done by religious insitutions. As Belloc noted, England did not need poor laws before the Reformation. The church, and especially the monasteries and convents, took care of the poor. Poor laws, the ancestors of today's welfare state, were enacted only after the church ceased to fulfill its responsibility in this area. People of limited mental abilities, above the level of severe dysfunction, and of sound body, should be encouraged to find work that is within their grasp rather than being subsidized in idleness and vice as they are today. In all candor, society needs hewers of wood and drawers of water, and should let those who can only do such work, do it. The criminal underclass should not be idly warehoused in prisons where they only learn worse behavior, but set to useful labor (e.g., on chain-gangs), as a punishment in cases of such crimes for which it is inappropriate to punish them corporally or capitally. Those utterly unable to support themselves, for reasons having nothing to do with moral failings - fatherless infants, the indigent aged in their dotage, the mentally deficient - obviously need compassionate care at a standard equivalent to or better than what they receive under the current regimen. The natural and unhindered rise of persons having superior qualities of intellect and character will result in an organically developed aristocracy, such as that which developed and persisted for centuries in Western civilization prior to the advent of radical egalitarianism. It persisted as long as it did because the traits necessary for leadership are largely inherited - and they will reassert themselves naturally if only the perverse influence of egalitarianism is eliminated. People of this class should be suitably educated for leadership as they historically were from the time of Quintilian (if not earlier) until the advent of cultural Bolshevism. The founders of this country would be astonished at today's universal suffrage, one-person-one-vote "democracy." They envisioned a society in which the franchise was confined to freeholders, who then paid all the taxes. There is nothing inherently "racialist" about a tax-qualified franchise, notwithstanding how poll taxes may have been used in the past. Persons who receive subsidies from the state (as opposed to due compensation for services rendered or goods sold) should be disqualified from exercising the franchise, just as a judge or juror who has a financial interest in the outcome of a lawsuit is disqualified from ruling on it. For a view of how these points are compatible with Christianity, see not Gobineau but Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira. His "Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII" lists numerous Christian authorities, including the named late Pope, who have endorsed the idea that inequality is a natural and normal feature of human society and that it is both possible and desirable to comfort the afflicted (which is Christian charity) without afflicting the comfortable (which is not Christianity, but Jacobinism, Bolshevism, New-Deal-ism, etc.). Sent at: 2008 05 16