Dr. Ben Carson has been in the media spotlight since speaking at this year’s annual prayer breakfast in February in Washington, D.C.
In that speech the famed pediatric neurosurgeon blasted President Barack Obama’s health care policies and came under mainstream media scrutiny. While he claims no political affiliation, he became a hero to conservatives.
Carson tells Newsmax the personal and political attacks he has undergone, including protests from students and faculty at Johns Hopkins University that ended up with him stepping down from delivering this year’s commencement address, haven’t turned him off politics.
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To the contrary, they have spurred him on.
At the same time, it saddens him to see others become afraid to speak out because of intimidation in a country that was founded on freedom of expression.
“We’ve fallen so far, we should be very alarmed about what’s going on here.”
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And while many now know him from his growing political profile, Carson and his wife have funded scholarships for students since 1994. But the Johns Hopkins University-based physician says education and medicine are two equally vital cogs in America’s future.
“It’s sort of like we have a ship that’s about to sail off of Niagara Falls and everybody’ll be killed, and there’s a bunch of barnacles on the side and people are saying, “Uh, we need to get that barnacle off; no, let’s get that one off,” Carson told Newsmax TV after an appearance at a gathering of black conservatives in Washington, D.C. “In the meantime, boop, over the cliff; it doesn’t really matter anymore.”
America’s founders said that the viability of the country depends on having a well-informed and educated populace, Carson said. “And if we ever have something less than that, the nature of our country will change.”
The problem, he said, is that there are two tiers: the highly educated who do well (a shrinking number) and everyone else.
“Our public schools used to be the envy of the world in the pre-1930 time,” Carson told Newsmax. But values are no longer taught, he said, and the country is suffering as a result.
He also favors charter schools as part of a school choice program, saying that competition keeps schools from becoming complacent.
“Schools and teachers, educators, they’re no different than anybody else. People tend to respond to stimulation, and if there’s no stimulation they tend to kind of relax.”
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Regarding entitlement programs, Carson noted that America has always been a humanitarian country. Even when the United States was much smaller and federal programs didn’t exist to help people in need, no one ever starved; local communities took care of their own.
“I remember when I first started practicing medicine, most doctors, 10, 15 percent of their patients were indigent patients — didn’t have any money,” he told Newsmax. “No problem. You just took care of them anyway …”
The United States also must enact business-friendly policies, Carson said. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that if you have the highest corporate tax rates in the world, you’re not going to attract corporations.”
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