I have to admit that when I learned that upcoming failed presidential candidate, Michael Bloomberg, who is also the nanny mayor of New York, is instituting a program to pay people to do what they’re supposed to do as productive people and citizens I just about hit the roof.

Nanny Bloomy wants to dole out payments for kids to attend class, take tests, do homework, stay drug free; for parents to attend PTA meetings, get birth control and educate themselves on how not to shoot them and their families in the foot by behaving stupidly.

Damn! I wish that was around when I was a kid, or when my kids were kids. I’d be writing this from a villa in Italy.

As someone who lived in New York for many, many years, I observed first hand the complete destruction of three or four generations of black and Hispanic families at the hands of misguided liberals whose guilt ridden answer to their own success was to throw money at those who hadn’t yet achieved it.

How much of a judge of human nature does one have to be to learn that once you give people anything for doing nothing they will continue to do nothing? But, as liberals like to say about other peoples’ behavior, Who are we to judge?

Well, me! I’m here to judge. Liberals were stupid. (Still are, IMO, but that’s for another post.) Patrick Moynahan tried to tell them these welfare payments for families and multiple teen pregnancies would send black families off the rails. For this accusation of “benign neglect” on the part of welfare doler-outers the liberal Democrat Moynahan was vilified by the left and accused of being a racist, insensitive to the needs of blacks. And down the tubes went a few more generations of black kids.

Liberals like to turn on their own when their own don’t toe the party line. Joe Lieberman. Enough said.

In effect liberal policy can be summed up in a rewrite of a famous, old adage that says “Give a man a fish and you feed him for one day. But give a man a poisoned fish and you feed him for the rest of his life.” The re-write is courtesy of a colleague, Bill Marsiili, who happens to be the writer of the film Deja Vu.

So, when I heard that more money was being tossed at minorities, I thought of Bill and figured it was liberal deja vu all over again one more time as usual.

Let’s start from a common jumping off point. Republicans and Democratics, liberals and conservatives can agree that it’s in all our interests to to get people out of poverty, in a job, their kids educated and put on the road to a productive life. Thinking about all this, I’m grudgingly concluding that this is a money giveaway that just could be making some sense.

I have some acquaintances who’ve been justly outraged by past money giveaways without requiring something in return. They, like I, asked why weren’t welfare recipients required to clean streets, mow lawns, help teachers and schools or do community service in exchange for the free loot? What was the outome, the result of this government largesse?

Their anger was legitimate. The “free” money was a slap in the face of these hard working, often struggling citizens, many of whom were themselves only marginally above a living condition endured by welfare recipients. But they were doing it by the book. It’s pretty easy to see why they’d be pissed. It’s understandable and, IMO, justifiable.

Human nature, again. And again the liberals had no clue people would become so angry. More likely, they knew and didn’t care.

But this program provides an outcome. Instead of the welfare paradigm — we’ll give you money, but you have to do something for it, it’s, You do something first and then we’ll give you money. And what we’re asking people to do are things that not only help them, but will eventually benefit society. After all, don’t many of us pay our kids to do chores and even to do their homework, or get good grades?

Sure, these were things kids were supposed to do, they were activities taken for granted by generations of parents. You never got a pioneer kid telling his dad he won’t feed the horses or milk the cows unless he gets paid for it. How long do you think it would take that kid to get up off the ground and go whimpering off to the barn to get the job done?

There are no more pioneer kids. Hell, there aren’t any Big Depression kids, or World War II kids. These kids knew what it meant to get down to it, work hard and get an education. Generations have changed, kids have changed, we have changed.

However, the ultimate goal is to get everyone operating on all cylinders. This approach is better than than just giving money to people and at least forces them to participate in activities and behaviors that could get them a better life and make them productive members of society. IF that happens, and it’s a big IF, we’ll all be better off for it.

The problem, of course, is government. They’ll eff it up like they always do and I need to see how they plan to administrate this thing before coming close to liking it. But look, we’ve got to get people educated and involved. Throwing money at them didn’t work, so maybe throwing money at them to improve themselves might be a step up. People respond to incentives and if you’re going to transfer money to the poor, you might as well link it to behaviors that might reduce future poverty.