I’ve take the liberty of removing the specifics about black America here and just reference America.  I don’t think the problem here is racial.  It social.

Six  years ago I wrote a book called Uncle Sam’s Plantation. I wrote the book to tell  my own story of what I saw living inside the  welfare state and my own transformation out of  it.
I said in that book that indeed there  are two Americas — a poor America on socialism  and a wealthy America on  capitalism.

I talked about  government programs like Temporary Assistance  for Needy Families (TANF), Job Opportunities and  Basic Skills Training (JOBS), Emergency  Assistance to Needy Families with Children  (EANF), Section 8 Housing, and Food  Stamps.

A vast sea of perhaps  well-intentioned government programs, all  initially set into motion in the 1960s by  Democrats, that were going to lift the nation’s  poor out of poverty.

A benevolent Uncle  Sam welcomed mostly poor Americans onto  the government plantation.  Those who  accepted the invitation switched mindsets from  “How do I take care of myself?” to “What do I  have to do to stay on the  plantation?”  Instead of solving economic  problems, government welfare socialism created  monstrous moral and spiritual problems — the  kind of problems that are inevitable when  individuals turn responsibility for their lives  over to others.

The legacy of American  socialism is our blighted inner cities,  dysfunctional inner city schools, and broken  black families.

Through God’s grace, I  found my way out. It was  then that I understood what freedom meant and  how great this country is.

I had the  privilege of working on welfare reform in 1996  which was passed by a Republican controlled  Congress.

I thought we were on the road  to moving socialism out of our poor communities and replacing it with  wealth-producing American  capitalism.  But, incredibly, we are  now going in  the opposite direction.

Instead of poor   America on socialism becoming more like rich  American on capitalism, rich America on  capitalism is becoming like poor America on socialism.

Uncle Sam has welcomed our  banks onto the plantation and they have said,  “Thank you, Suh.”

Now, instead of  thinking about what creative things need to be  done to serve customers, they are thinking about  what they have to tell Massah in order to get  their cash.  There is some kind of irony  that this is all happening under our first black  president on the 200th anniversary of the  birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

Worse,  socialism seems to be the element of our new  young president. And maybe even more troubling,  our corporate executives seem happy to move onto  the plantation.  In an op-Ed on the  opinion page of the Washington Post,  Mr. Obama is clear that the goal of his trillion  dollar spending plan is much more than short  term economic stimulus.

“This plan is  more than a prescription for short-term spending  — it’s a strategy for   America’s long-term  growth and opportunity in areas such as  renewable energy, healthcare, and  education.”

Perhaps more incredibly,  Obama seems to think that government taking over  an economy is a new idea. Or that massive growth  in government can take place “with unprecedented  transparency and accountability.”

Yes,  sir, we heard it from Jimmy Carter when he  created the Department of Energy, the Synfuels  Corporation, and the Department of  Education.  Or how about the Economic  Opportunity Act of 1964 — The War on Poverty — which President Johnson said “…does not merely  expand old programs or improve what is already  being done. It charts a new course. It strikes  at the causes, not just the consequences of  poverty.”

Trillions of dollars later,  poverty is the same. But families  are not, with triple the incidence of  single-parent homes and out-of-wedlock  births.

It’s not complicated.  Americans can accept Barack Obama’s invitation  to move onto the plantation. Or they can choose  personal responsibility and freedom.  Does  anyone really need to think about what the  choice should be?

“The trouble with  socialism is that you eventually run out of  other people’s  money.”