I hope you like cucumbers

I mentioned awhile back that I was going to try and grow a garden for the first time in my adult life. I also mentioned the rain barrel system I had constructed to keep the garden a-growin' all summer. My dad warned me up front to not over-plant the plot, as it only stands about 6' x 12'. Sensible advice, I thought. So, I planted two tomato plants, two cucumber plants, and three green pepper plants. I think I even used the spacing directions from the plant tags, but I can't remember for certain.

So, this is what I've got going on back there now. The cucumber plants (which are covered with yellow buds) have taken over the world, and are now growing over and through the rabbit fence. The two tomato plants have grown out of the tops of their cages, and I have a third "volunteer" (?) tomato plant that's doing well without a cage of its own. The pepper plants, which look sickly to me, produced a pepper that Amanda picked this afternoon.

I'd like to be able to claim that I did something special to produce these results, but the only thing I've put on the plants is the rain water from the barrel system.

Unintended consequences

It's one thing to say you care about helping people, another thing to actually do something to help people, and yet another thing to do something that actually does help people in the long run. We should all rebuke the man who says he cares for the poor, but never offers them a loaf of bread. He's a hypocrite. But, don't forget that we should also rebuke the man who says he cares for the poor and then invents programs that will guarantee that they will always be so. This man is also a hypocrite, perhaps even more so because he likes to remind us all of how cold and calloused we are for not jumping on his programs-for-the-poor bandwagon.

Borrowing heavily from Doug Wilson's thoughts, we need to not only care about the needs of the poor, but we need to care enough to offer solutions that will actually help them. It's one thing to have good intentions, but what if the measures we take to "help the poor" actually make things worse? In such a case, everyone would be better off if we had done nothing at all. To borrow again from Wilson, what if our shipments of "relief" to an impoverished community in Africa are diverted to the local dictator and his armies, keeping him in power and assuring that the people under his tyranny will continue to starve? Are these people better off because of the so-called aid we've provided? What if sending out government checks to those "less fortunate than us" encourages them to not get married, not find a job, and to have more illegitimate children? Are they better off because of it? Judging by the progress in the War on Poverty (which, I should mention, has gone on much longer, and at much greater cost, than the war in Iraq), I would say that we're teaching people to be less responsible, and more dependent on their governmental ATM, which will most certainly run out of cash at some point.

While this shouldn't be misconstrued as an excuse to not do anything, it should serve as a warning that we should evaluate the potential consequences (intentional and otherwise) of any governmental (or social, for that matter) intervention before we launch the latest and greatest new program to solve everyone's problems for them. I say we employ this novel approach before the proposed legislation bailing out mortgage lenders and "distressed" home owners gets through Congress. The legislation is "meant to save hundreds of thousands of troubled homeowners from foreclosure. The legislation would create a government-backed mortgage insurance program with the power to refinance as much as $300 billion worth of failing home loans."

Hey, that sounds great. I mean, think of the CHILDREN! Think of their PETS! Don't we have a responsibility–nay, a duty–to protect people from the consequences of their decisions? Continue reading this post »