Poor Richard...

I was going to post about a quote from Benjamin Franklin:

"I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer."

I wanted to write a post about what we do to our poor in the name of "helping" them, and that Obama and the Left are clearly on the opposite side of some wise thinkers.

I wanted to find the exact quote so I Bing'ed it (I've been protesting Google for some time now), and I found that William Sullivan had already written old Ben's comparison to young Barack, at the American Thinker.  Sullivan blogs HERE, and its a good blog.

"Benjamin Franklin was an industrious and brilliant liberal of his time, a man not only responsible for creating personal wealth, but in part responsible for creating the wealthiest nation on Earth. Yet we have seen Americans disavow his longstanding wisdom to embrace an ideology wholly contrary to our founders', peddled by a modern-day liberal academic who has created no true wealth, but only sought to redistribute it -- all with clearly detrimental results."





[Poor Richard was a pseudonym used by Franklin when he first published his Almanac.  Franklin based Poor Richard on characters from early almanacs, and from another character who predicted the deaths of almanac writers.  In Poor Richards Almanac, Franklin would predict the deaths of writers of other almanacs, and then later falsely report the deaths, and as being accurately predicted.  It was a joke...they don't make them like old Ben anymore!]

P.S.  I found the Ben Franklin quote in Newt Gingrich's new book.