Does One Great Man Out Weigh 1000 Criminals

I read a book called Freakanomics and in it was a statement that the drop in crime rates in the mid-1990s was a direct correlation to the Roe-v-Wade decision 20 years earlier. In this train of thought the unwanted children, that had been forced to be carried by the mothers that did not want them, were now off the streets and not there to commit the crimes so there was a drastic drop in crime. In the world of facts and figures without contemplation, this might be a good explanation, but under scrutiny this does not hold much water. If we take 20 years before the peak crime era in the late 1980s, we see that it is true Abortion was illegal in most states. It is also true that a number of poor childern were born to poor and unready mothers. And some of these childern became criminals. But if his theory was correct then would not crime rate always been high when abortion was illegal and hard to get? It happen that crime rates had started to spike in the late 1960s and slowly increased until 1993. Before that the crime rates were 1/3th of what they were in the 1990s after the so-called effect of abortion. A better theory if this author wants to try and explain the fall in crime, or better explain the initial rise in crime is look at the effect of the "Great Society" on crime. I see a better corrilation to the beginning and the reduction of crime to the beginning of "Welfare" and the "Welfare Reform" in the middle 1990's.

At this point I want to ask another question. What is effect of Abortion on Society? If you think thru this questions you would have to say that a good number of criminals do comeout of the poor or unready mothers giving birth, but that is not all that comes out of these situations. Some of the greatest men in our nation's history have come from very difficult situations. What if these men were not born? Let us use an active history look at Andrew Jackson.

Andrew Jackson was born in rural Carolina just months after his father had died and his mother was living on the charity of others. Today a mother in this situation would be suggested to have an abortion. "You can't raise this child, he will not have a happy life. He will be nothing in society" If this happened what would this country look like? For one the Indian Wars in Alabama could of ended much differently. Jackson would not of been in the position to expell the English in Mobile months before they landed in New Orleans. The commander of the garrison at New Orleans would not have the volunteers from Tennessee and Kentucky nor would they of had the Pirates of the Cajun such as Jean Lafitte. They also would have had a commander that was a Bureaucrat not a fighting general. And most likely the city would have fallen without a shot. England would have held New Orleans and most of the Gulf coast and we would have had no way to regain it. Without Jackson we also would not have been there to stop Spain from ceding Florida to England. This would not end here.

If there was no Jacksonian Presidency then many more betterments would never have happened. The populous movement would never have had the strong figurehead it needed. He stopped the first secession of a state. He first showed the strength of the bully pulpit that the President has. He was also the founding force of the modern Democratic Party. (Nobody's Perfect) He fought the corrupt banking system and won. And due to Jackson's support of the Texan revolution and the underhand support of this adventure by Sam Houston, Texas would have stayed part of Mexico and because of this, California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico would never have become part of the United States and we would have a narrow path to the Pacific Ocean.

With the lost of one poor orphaned child, with no money or status, we as a country would have been harmed enourmously. How does a society balance one great man? One Criminal, 10, 100, 1000, 1,000,000? How many lives did Andrew Jackson change for the better? The Population of the country and all the posterity. The worth of one man conqurering adversisty is far in excess of millions of possible criminals.