The Safety Hammock

En los comentarios a este post salieron algunas cosas interesantes sobre el welfare argento. Como siempre en momentos de duda o incertidumbre, podemos recurrir a la sabiduría de Bill Whittle :

It is my firm belief that in any decent society, in any civilization worth living in, the healthy and the fit have a moral obligation to render assistance to those in need. None of the people I consider friends and ideological companions cares to live in a country where children are starving on the streets. And we don’t, despite what the BBC or Pravda or The New York Times would have you believe. Actually, that comparison was unfair to Pravda.

Welfare, as envisioned, was designed to provide assistance to people who, through economic downturns or other swings of fate, were momentarily unable to care for themselves and their families. This is a noble idea, and one of many prerequisites for a decent and honorable society.

Furthermore, we must accept the fact that through disabilities of birth, or injury, or chronic illness, many people will be unable to make their own way in this world. And of those unfortunate people, there will be a significant number who lack the family and personal support networks available to others, and who will need to depend on public assistance for the rest of their lives. These, too, are deserving of our help, and it seems to me that a decent society has a moral obligation to provide care and comfort for those with such afflictions. A nation as successful and prosperous as we are can not only afford to assist these people; a people as decent and generous as Americans will insist upon it.

That was the plan.

The problems is, as I mentioned before, that we no longer have a safety net; we have created a safety hammock, where an entire subculture of millions of otherwise capable people have come to rely on public handouts for their livelihoods, with no intention whatsoever of assuming responsibility for their own lives.

I can truthfully state that I do not know the numbers, or proportions, of people on welfare who have no business being there, but they certainly appear to be significant.

If we are to speak frankly and intelligently about this issue, we must recognize that there are two sides of this coin of responsibility. The first is the obligation society has to the poor, outlined above.

What is not discussed is the reciprocal responsibility; namely: what obligation does the poor have to society?

I think there’s a simple answer for that, much simpler than most people realize. I think that if we have a moral obligation to help those in need, then those in need have a moral obligation to recover and stand on their own two feet as quickly as possible.

Let’s take a relative compassion test, shall we? Who is more compassionate: those that want to limit the helping hand in order to allow someone to get back on their feet, gain an education, recover their self-esteem, manifest their self-worth, and lift themselves from the crippling depths of poverty, or someone who wants to hand them an endless supply of meager checks, just enough to destroy their self-respect, hobble their motivation, and sentence them, and their children, and their grandchildren, and their children, to squalid and wasted lives?

I oppose the creation and maintenance of a class of people perpetually on the dole because we simply cannot afford it. And I’m not talking financially -– we have the money to do that until the end of time. We cannot afford the human cost. We cannot afford to squander entire generations of Einsteins and Sagans and Mozarts and Da Vincis by condemning them to a life that consists solely of pushing a lever and getting a food pellet. We need all the help we can get in this struggle toward a more perfect Union. Training people how to remain passive, dependent and miserable is not noble, it is not just, and it is least of all compassionate.

But being the person who brings those benefits home from Washington does, I have noticed, put a fair amount of power, prestige and money in the hands of those elites that call themselves “Champions of the Poor.”

If I were elected Champion of the Poor, my first goal would be the elimination of my job in as short a time as possible -– by teaching people how to care for themselves, how to succeed and thrive and prosper -– in other words, how to be poor no longer. Not by their own bootstraps -– I’m not that naïve. But we, together, should be able to provide the assistance to get this much-needed human potential out of the stagnant swamp that forty years of public assistance has put them in.

We have thrown a lot of money at this problem, for nearly half a century now, with no noticeable improvement. Maybe the answer is not to throw just money, but to throw attitudes. It seems worth a try. I don’t see how we could do much worse.

Brillante, como siempre.