John J. Miller of National Review Online laments the fact that people don’t feel enough shame when they use “food stamps”:
Seems like there ought to be a stigma attached to the use of welfare. A little bit of shame can go a long way toward encouraging people to find jobs. The federal government may think it’s doing people a favor by providing them with access to food, but it’s doing them a disservice if it also robs them of the motivation necessary to break free from dependency.
I disagree. The stigma should be attached to the people giving out the welfare. The real welfare abusers are not the people who take a few hundred dollars per month to buy food; they’re the government agents who spend their “careers” leaching off society’s productive class. These are the people who destroy society’s capacity to create jobs for the welfare recipients whom Mr. Miller is eager to shame.
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I would even go a step further. It’s not just the people handing out the food stamps, but the architects of such programs. Unfortunately, those who designed such programs are ideologues who not only feel no shame, but are proud of their accomplishments in making gov’t the Savior of the Masses.
The true “parasite class” of society isn’t the welfare whores, but rather the welfare pimps: the institution of government itself. Income redistribution is a double crime: theft from workers, and addictive dependence by those who accept the largesse.
Unfortunately when the majority of society comes to depend on gov’t for something or another (education, healthcare, transportation, etc.), shame loses its effectiveness. In making itself seem indispensable, gov’t creates a majority of defenders. Like the religious fundamentalist who could not imagine (in any positive way) how he could possibly live without god, so too is the majority of society now utterly incapable of imagining life without gov’t, or even with a greatly scaled-back gov’t.
Thanks a lot for this Great post.
I don’t like poor people. They are such a nuisance, so bothersome. Always looking for a handout, they are so willing to accept other people’s taxes to buy groceries, when they could just pull themselves up by the bootstraps and eat food out of garbage cans. I miss the good old days. Someday, all the poor will hold bake sales, and the money wasted on government welfare programs will go to buy bombers.
I notice that the Congressional Black Caucus is holding one of the main opponents of Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Fed. They are concerned about the “needs of their constituents.” Groups like this, the NAACP, etc.. and the politicians that back them and enact policies aimed at minorities (in order to gain that valuable voting block) have done significantly more harm to minorities than the KKK. I wish the racists like Melvin Watt and Jesse Jackson would do the minorities a favor and STFU
“The stigma should be attached to the people giving out the welfare. ”
To word this more precisely, the stigma should be attached to the people taking other peoples money and spending it on welfare.
To word it more precisely still, the stigma should be attached to the people taking other peoples money.
Quote from random neoconservative nutjob: “I don’t like poor people.”
I don’t like self-righteous socialists who are always so generous with other people’s money and then get all indignant when these other people don’t like being robbed to support the socialist’s politics.
Wouldn’t it be nice if people were generous with their own money and kept their fingers off of other people’s property. Robbery is robbery, no matter what the loot is used for, nor how many people might think it’s a good idea.
Shame on the looters from gunvernment. There’s nothing wrong with accepting help when you are in need. Indeed, most of us are happy to give and help whe we see others in distress.
@random neoconservative nutjob: With you own money buddy.
I say everyone in the welfare state food chain is guilty of theft, particularly the pull-peddling politricksters who invented the scheme to buy votes, and their Papist relatives and friends who comprise the majority of the welfare state bureaucracy.
Since somewhere between 80-90% of the borrowed money wasted on these scams goes into “administrative expenses”, the bureaucracy is by far the biggest looter…
And Congress just voted in more of this as a health care insurance corporation gravy train!
Yes, it’s the robbers who should feel shame. But more than that, robbery should be illegal, regardless of who’s doing it. And I think welfare recipients should feel some shame, just as anyone would in accepting gifts from a thief. One should stop and think about whose hands that was taken from.
Haha, perfect post!
The poor are so bad, they take money for food. This is unlike the defense industry, medical-industrial complex, old people, the banking system, etc who just take the money.
The funny part is that the poor have the least amount of force at their disposal. It is the wealthy bureaucracy that uses force to collect it that is the true culprit here.
Bogart,
The bureacracy would not be able to steal from the middle class if it weren’t supported and legitimated by the votes of those who support redistribution. In the words of Walt Kelly, “We have met the enemy, and he is us”.
Although you sometimes have to “sell” welfare differently, its main purpose has been to pacify the recipients while creating a sense of moral outrage among the looted at the recipients not the looters.
I look upon willing recipients of government benefits, which are always funded with OPM (sounds like opium, is equally addicting, stands for other-people’s money), not as evil people who should be stigmatized. but rather as sick people who are in need of healing. They all are or will soon become addicted to government benefits in much the same way as alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, drug addicts, overeaters, and other victims of addiction are. They are driven by a compulsion beyond their ability to resist, which many who are not effected find difficult if not impossible to comprehend.
Just as the stigma of alcoholism has lifted significantly since it was recognized as a treatable disease by the American Medical Association many years ago, so too will the victims of OPM be relieved of some of the stigma when their compulsive behavior is treated as a disease and victims begin to recover, perhaps by following a regimen based on the hugely successful 12-Step Program of Alcoholics Anonymous, which has been adapted to the successful treatment of many other forms of compulsive behavior.
Nor do I look upon those who provide the OPM eaters with their OPM as necessarily bad people. More often than not the drug pushers who supply narcotics addicts, the bartenders who serve alcoholics, the waiters and waitresses who serve overeaters, the dealers who man the tables where compulsive gamblers lose everything, and the politicians and bureaucrats who distribute public benefits to OPM addicts, as often as not are themselves afflicted by the same or some other addiction.
The impact of OPM use upon its victims is almost identical to the effects of alcohol on an alcoholic or cocaine upon an addict. Their drug of choice robs them of their ability to operate as responsible members of society, robs them of their self worth, their health, and their ability to earn a living, As damaging as their behavior may be to other members of society, what they do to themselves is much worse. They are people more in need of our sympathy than stigmatization.
It goes without saying that those who distribute government benefits to OPM eaters are themselves consuming large amounts of OPM, are therefore unquestionably addicted, and thus equally worthy of the same sympathy we should show to any other sick person. Let us not flog them, but forgive them, and where we can, personally help them and pray for them as we would for a relative with cancer.
even though it feeds the beast at least it is one way to get back some of your tax money. Society come to a a “get yours” mentality. Short of violent overthrow the tax rate and nature of what is taxed will not regress.
What if the government enacted a new welfare program, and no one signed up for it, insisting instead on only seeking financial assistance from private sources (friends, family, charities, etc.) out of principle?
There is a large percentage of Americans (most of them?) who actively seek a government handout every chance they get (Cash for Clunkers, etc.) and, therefore, are just as morally culpable for wealth redistribution programs as the governmental institutions who run them. If those programs did not have a steady supply of new “customers” due to widespread, moral opposition, then they would soon be discredited and defunded. Instead, we have virtual Black Friday crowds lined up outside of governmental offices every day of the year and crying, “Gimme, gimme, gimme!”
Yes, there are some genuinely needy people out there, but how many people receiving governmental assistance today have widescreen TVs, mobile phones, cable TV, computers, or game consoles in their homes? How many chose to sell off all of the non-essential, entertainment goods they owned; to downsize their vehicle or outright sell it; to sell their house and move into a cheaper rental property; or eliminate their kids’ expensive extracurricular activities before accepting the first dollar from the government? Not many, I would suspect.
While taking OPM may be deplorable, remember that all choices are made at the margin. When the gov’t starts issuing massive amounts of student loans, car subsidies, farm subsidies, bank loans, welfare, or any other good for less up front cost than private efforts, the consumer is put into a situation where private aid is not cheap enough to acquire. Further the private efforts are constantly undermined by a tax supported system that can run indefinitely at a loss, driving the private alternative from the market altogether.
I’m not proud, but I had to take federal loans because the scholarship and private loan market is so stagnant, merely because the federal loans are offered. TPTB know, at least at some level, that they are forcing more people to come begging to the state for help, giving more excuse to claim that the state must offer more help, regardless of the willingness of the people.
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