Calvin Helin

Best-selling Author, International Speaker, Lawyer,
Entrepreneur & Activist for Self-Reliance

Calvin Helin has been called the prophet of self-reliance, and a thinker whose brave ideas evoke at once Thomas Jefferson’s zeal for independence and Martin Luther King Jr.’s audacious “I have a dream” idealism. He is a courageous innovative leader whose groundbreaking ideas of hope have found a fertile audience in anxious times where people live in fear for their children’s lives and dreams.

At a time when economic dependency, the most deceptive pandemic of the twenty first century, is sweeping the world, Mr. Helin’s ideas provide a blueprint for transforming economic dependency into healthier outcomes providing greater individual happiness and national security through insight and common sense.

His first book Dances with Dependency, now a six times best seller, has resulted in “reviewers been universally star-struck with the brilliance of this well researched book.” It is time for renewed hope and for individuals and nations to take control of their destiny through Wai Wah!—Just Do It!

The Economic Dependency Trap

From drug-riddled urban public housing projects to impoverished Aboriginal reservations to decaying coal mining towns, economic dependency has become a way of life for millions. But government welfare checks instill in their recipients a false sense of entitlement. The results are inferiority complexes, victim thinking, lack of confidence, learned helplessness, inability to cope with adversity, an absence of self-responsibility and accountability, and ultimately an inability to feel the freedom that self-sufficiency can bring. Worse, such attitudes are passed on from generation to generation until too often escape seems impossible.

What many policymakers and commentators fail to realize is that the corrosive effects of economic dependency are not limited to the poor. Consider the $2 trillion in foreign aid that the United States, Canada, and other governments have paid to developing nations in the last half century—with disheartening results. Or the billions in bailout money paid to financial institutions because they are “too big to fail.” The damage caused by programs like these, it turns out, is no different from the sense of entitlement created by middle-class parents around the world who lavish newfound wealth on their children, only to find themselves creating a spoiled, undisciplined younger generation lacking the skills and even the desire to become responsible adults.

Author Calvin Helin worked his way up from an impoverished boyhood in a remote First Nations village in northern British Columbia to become a successful attorney and international businessman. He has dedicated his life to helping others break the bonds of economic dependency and emerge with newfound confidence and self-worth. Now, in his new book, The Economic Dependency Trap: Breaking Free to Self-Reliance, Helin reveals the hidden puppet strings attached to handouts on every level, from households to the global economy. He proposes groundbreaking, positive solutions in down-to-earth language every reader can relate to.

This book is essential reading for educators, community organizers, and others who work with the poor, as well as for pundits and policymakers. Most importantly, it is for people in all strata of society who are seeking a blueprint for breaking out of the prison of economic dependency, improving their own life circumstances, and achieving prosperity based on self reliance.

Dances With Dependency

Dances with Dependency offers effective strategies to eliminate welfare dependency and help eradicate poverty among North America’s indigenous populations. Beginning with an impassioned and insightful portrait of today’s native communities, it traces the prevailing impoverishment and despair directly to a “dependency mindset” forged by welfare economics. To reframe this debilitating mindset, it advocates policy reform in conjunction with a return to native peoples’ 10,000-year tradition of self-reliance based on personal responsibility and cultural awareness.
Author Calvin Helin, untethered to agendas of political correctness or partisan politics, describes the mounting crisis as an impending demographic tsunami threatening both the United States and Canada. In the United States, where government entitlement programs for diverse ethnic minorities coexist with an already huge national debt, prosperity, he proposes, is more obviously at stake. This looming tidal wave viewed constructively, however, can become an opportunity for reform—among not only indigenous peoples of North America but any impoverished population struggling with dependency in inner cities, developing nations, and post-totalitarian countries.