The Cruelty of Welfare

Timothy Birdnow

This courtesy of the Federalist Patriot:

"What entitlements do, and what the transformation of entitlements into rights does, is create a citizenry that increasingly lacks the most important character trait -- gratitude. Of all the characteristics needed for both a happy and morally decent life, none surpasses gratitude. Grateful people are happier, and grateful people are more morally decent. That is why we teach our children to say 'thank you.' But the welfare state undoes that. One does not express thanks for a right. So, instead of 'thank you,' the citizen of the welfare state is taught to say, 'What more can I get?' Yet, while producing increasingly selfish people, the mantra of the left, and therefore of the universities and the media, has been for generations that capitalism and the free market, not the welfare state, produces selfish people. They succeed in part because demonizing conservatives and their values is a left-wing art. But the truth is that capitalism and the free market produce less selfish people. Teaching people to work hard and take care of themselves (and others) produces a less, not a more, selfish citizen. Capitalism teaches people to work harder; the welfare state teaches people to want harder. Which is better?"

Dennis Prager

It's true, and I can personally vouche for it. Read my Orthodoxy Today essay on the fruits of the welfare state. http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles8/Birdnow-The-Progressive-Road-to-Hell.php

There is nothing more selfish than American poverty; it is entirely a function of people prefering to live at another's expense than to earn their way in the world, and children are simply tools to accomplish that end. The welfare state created the modern ghetto; they wouldn't exist without it.

Were the welfare state never to have existed, the people may still have been poor, but they would have been less poor, less dependent, less drug addicted, less drunken, less, well, POOR! In America, poverty is a state of mind; one is poor because one ultimately wants to be poor. The opportunity to climb out of the abyss is there for those serious about it. Unfortunately, the poor have been made helpless by the nanny state, and they cannot imagine living any other way. Why take a job at McDonalds when your friends are living off Uncle Sam, partying all the time and living easy? Granted, they live in a hellhole, but so do you when you start at an entry-level job. And, thanks to years of conditioning, your job skills are poor and attitude worse. Advancement is tough. Everyone you know thinks you a fool.

Thanks, do-gooders! You have cemented them in to a life not worth living.

The Bible says "if a man does not work he shall not eat" and we are built that way, whether one believes in the wisdom of the Bible or not. People who live like leeches cannot be happy; they know they aren't doing what they were built to do.

I manage apartments and houses. We have a tenant in one of them, a woman who has been on disability for psychiatric reasons for years. Our maintenance man took pity on her; she is a most unhappy person, and has little because she is a ward of the state. He paid her cash to clean some apartments, and she was THRILLED! She said that for the first time in much of her life she actually earned something, rather than have it given. She felt like she amounted to something.

That is what all the poor need; to be more than just a machine designed to consume. Even the rich sense this, volunteering their time to make them feel useful. The welfare state has one service that the poor serve; votes. The rest of their lives can be hanged; all they are supposed to do is consume and vote. It is a terrible cruelty.

A decent society would make them earn their daily bread. Oh, it isn't pleasant at first, but in the end it is the only real moral way to help them.

But when have liberals ever cared about morality and decency?