I’m talking about Section 8, WiC, food stamps and public assistance.
I hate to say, but I don’t see charitable donations outdoing the food stamps then what is provided by the state. Its hard to debate this with people, because liberals will often use these Government programs as a necessity for helping people
Would people get as effective help without these welfare programs? There’s obviously a lot of problems with privatizing them, so I really don’t see what to say.
We also have high standards of living with a population of 300 million.
We have to look at why these people need welfare to begin with:
Government taxes curve investment, which takes a toll on productivity.
Minimum wage disallows everybody from finding a job. Unemployment welfare makes the unemployed stayed unemployed for longer (less rush to find a job that meets the person’s reservation wage).
At a certain point, people drop moral responsibility, because the State will take on that responsibility (by forcing it on those “who can afford it”).
Welfare creates or excacerbates the problems it is supposed to help with. In a free society there wouldn’t be nearly the same amount of charity required to support those who cannot make a living. And, it would be hard to imagine somebody who could not make a living, unless they had something physically impeding them (even illness) or because they genuinely refused to work.
Private charity and mutual aid networks have been mostly stamped out by the state, for various reasons, including the fact that forcing people to rely on them for well-being leads to a general attitude of subservience. Absent the state, then, one would expect to see a vast increase in the amount of private charity, and things like fraternal societies that will help out everyone involved.
I would also question the effectiveness of such programs in “helping” people. In my home county almost 40% of the residents live below the poverty line and the unemployment level has been around 10% for years (the number without work who arent looking must be much higher). Go to www.fedstats.gov and look up Allendale, South Carolina to see for yourself.
For these reasons I left, but I didnt have to go far to find opportunity. I only had to move an hour and a half away to the coast where the economy was booming and had been for 30 years. I took a job in construction and was floored when I saw how much of the work was done by hispanics. Some how thousands of these fellas were able to save up the huge sum of money to pay their way across the boarder, find out where the work was, get transportation to the work, find a place to live, and get a job. They did this without much education and without speaking english!
It is sad what we have done to our society, an hour away there are thousands of american citizens who didnt take the opportunity to improve their lot in life. But “illegals” did and they did so with all the cards stacked against them. I have a feeling if the nations south of the border had the government assistance we do here, we wouldnt have an “immigration problem”. They would sit at home on the government dime too. It seems as though the government dole ultimately helps no one, however it does seem to corrupt all it touches.
In fact, I know people who I work with that have gone bankrupt… and, alas, they are still alive and still surviving. Why should I be forced to pay for other people’s bad decisions? I think, morally, the better option would be for that person to accept the responsibility of their poor decision, and get themselves out of the rut they’ve carved. OTOH, there is no objection towards voluntary aid, or charity.
Burton Folsom Jr., in his book New Deal or Raw Deal?, makes the interesting observation that many charities were hurt by Roosevelt’s administration, given that charities generally were better at helping the poor than government wealth redistribution policies. Government pretty much crowded charity out of the market, in a sense.
lol, the liberals have soft hearts but it extends to their minds. they care so much about ‘poverty’ that they steal from the productive in society and trap the ‘poor’ in their poverty instituting them as a fixed class.
Read what George Reisman wrote in his book on ‘opportunities’.
hazlitt also wrote a book on poverty. its quite good despite the minarchism.
Tell’em it’s an appeal to emotion, which is a fallacy. Or, you could tell the professor that his presence negatively affects your emotions, and therefore, he should leave the classroom.
However, what if someone can’t make a living because they go bankrupt to pay for health care?
What kind of situation are trying to describe? Where someone is sick and cant work, so they can go on welfare to survive? Are they terminally ill? Temporarially disabled? Permanently disabled? What someone can do is entirely dependant on their specific circumstances.
People are highly resourceful when faced with adversity. It does not matter what the adversity is. When there is no longer a need to act for your own well being, people don’t. They become complacent and dependant. This is what welfare, unemployment, and universal health care do. They remove the need for people to act on thier own behalf, critically think about their own lives and about the decisions that they make. I think that the situation that I described above demonstrates this concept very well. People travel thousands of miles and save up extrodinary amounts of money to fulfull their needs. The ones who have their needs filled by the government cant even travel one hundred miles or save a dime. It is only here in extremely wealthy societies that we teach and institutionalize helplessness.
All the good intentions of the progressives have done nothing, but create and foster a world where nothing changes because there is no need to change. That is the cycle of poverty that our dogooders talk about so much, but it is thier solutions that created the cycle. So to answer your concerns more directly people will find a way as long as they have the need to find a way, and government programs will only impoverish us all.
That is the problem with many people who see the need for government action. I’d have to partly agree to “A society is judged by how they treat their lower citizens”
People tend to mix up the ideas of state and society to mean the same thing. In this case, they view any people as citizens and any citizens as people. The quote above is framed in such a way, to make one think that recognized agents of the state (citizens) are to be looked after by society, and the only way to do this is through government action.
Their veiwpoint is that something is wrong with society, and political action must be used to rectify that problem in society. They justify political action because it “helps poeple” but they seldom realize they are hurting poeple who are forced into helping these people. In most cases, this polticial action to help people actually hurts people it is said to help.
The libertarian viewpoint is that such political action through the state is ethically wrong because the state is illegitimate and the actions of the state break the nonaggression rule. A society free of the state would be more productive and more free to help those in their society who are in need.