Theft, welfare, and charity

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Wednesday, October 16. 2013

Theft, welfare, and charity

From EBT recipients stole food this weekend (and every other weekend) (h/t Vanderleun):

Middle class families are forced to watch as food is taken from the mouths of their children and given to others, in an elaborate political scheme to breed dependence and ensure a loyal voting base. If we’re OK with that, why shouldn’t we be OK with what happened at a few Walmarts this past weekend? Sure, YOU can’t walk into your local supermarket and take things off the shelves, but YOU aren’t entitled. Only certain people are entitled, and the government decides who those people are. Don’t you get it?

also

I’d like to at least believe that our tolerance for Welfare stems from some sort of charitable feeling. That still wouldn’t make it right, but it would make it perhaps more palatable. Yet, I know this isn’t the case. I believe strongly in giving to the poor, and my wife and I do just that. Anyone who wants to GIVE, and GIVE FREELY, is more than able to do so. It doesn’t, therefore, make sense to support the Nanny State simply because you wish to help the poor. You could help the poor without the government, and you know it.

On the contrary, I think most of us submit to and accept Entitlements because we lack the moral or mental energy to oppose them.

The UK and Scandinavia are reforming the living on the dole lifestyle

Posted by The Barrister in Our Essays, Politics at 14:11 | Comments (17) | Trackbacks (0)

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"I’d like to at least believe that our tolerance for Welfare stems from some sort of charitable feeling."

Our tolerance for welfare is because the media avoids it and when they must bring it up they reinforce the belief that these recipients are poor and need your help. It would be a totally different story if the media reported the ugly facts. A lot of people who get welfare live quite well, work under the table, have cars, cell phones, TVs, air conditioning, $200 sneakers, drugs, cigaretts, alcohol, etc. The problem is our free press are not doing their constitutional duty.

#1 GoneWithTheWind on 2013-10-16 16:18 (Reply)

But they have no dignity.

#1.1 The B. on 2013-10-16 16:35 (Reply)

Because the media and the lefty popular sentiment calls anyone who dares to question entitlements as mean, heartless, selfish and most good people would rather just keep their mouth shut than deal with that scorn.

Nobody wants to discuss the moral corruption of most welfare.

#2 phil g on 2013-10-16 17:49 (Reply)

It's funny. In recent years I've come to feel that I discuss almost nothing else. I feel like a broken record on the subject. What's weird is that I so seldom feel I've been able to break through to anyone, even when my audience is very much right-of-center.

To anyone who will listen, I argue that giving people your own property is charity, but using other people's property to satisfy your own need to feel charitable is dishonorable theft. And that's before you even get to the probable impact on the people receiving the charity.

#2.1 Texan99 on 2013-10-16 19:10 (Reply)

Rand said much of the same thing in Atlas Shrugged -

"Why is it immoral to produce something of value and keep it for yourself, when it is moral for others who haven't earned it to accept it? If it's virtuous to give, isn't it then selfish to take?"

http://www.working-minds.com/galtmini.htm

#2.1.1 fred zeppelin on 2013-10-17 07:30 (Reply)

While I agree 110% with all of this it just doesn't resonate with the low info voter like slanders of greed, seflish, uncaring...who wants to considered uncaring when the funds used won't come from their pocket?

#2.1.2 phil g on 2013-10-17 11:49 (Reply)

If I ever end up getting into a discussion about welfare, EBT, etc. inevitably someone will bring up a story from their mother or grandmother decades ago who had to use foodstamps in order to get by. There's always some personal connection that these people draw on to make a sweeping statement about a program that no longer is just helping single moms 'get by.'

It has grown well beyond that, and now includes way more 'free stuff' when this person's relative was receiving help. We are talking free cell phones, reduced or free rent, cash along with foodstamps, reduced energy bills, etc. These 'new' takers are taking more than someone who is working full-time on a minimum-wage job.

Is that how it should be? Should we really be discouraging people from taking low-paying jobs so they can sit and home and do nothing?

Judge Judy had it right on Megyn Kelly's show the other night, we are now supporting alcoholics and drug addicts with these programs. Are these the people we want to be helping continue their profligate lifestyle? It disgusts me.

This is NOT the group of people our generosity should be helping, and until someone does a comprehensive study to prove otherwise, I will guarantee you that 90% of the people who receive these types of benefits do not deserve them and should be left to figure out life on their own.

#3 MissT on 2013-10-16 18:32 (Reply)

This is deeply true, and I write as a person who is a social worker and makes his living evaluating the level of independence and helplessness a person actually has, in real time and real circumstances.

However, the 90% number is way out of line. We react that way because the unfairness bothers us so much. Most people who receive benefits at least partly deserve them. If you met them, you would say 50% are unquestionable, another 30% probable.

Yet most is not all, and even those who have some desert might be better served in the long run by fighting their way through. We err on the side of rescue because it makes us feel better, not because it is better for the recipient.

To act honorably in the face of a difficult temptation is an important thing, and it is sad that the poor are no longer allowed to participate in it. We have robbed them with gifts.

The opposite irony is also true. We do not give because we rich prefer to think it is not necessary. We rob ourselves of learning charity by focusing on the unworthiness of the recipients. Of course they are unworthy. So are we. That is perhaps the difference in the Christian understanding of charity - not that all are worthy, but that all are unworthy.

#3.1 Assistant VIllage Idiot (Link) on 2013-10-16 23:14 (Reply)

Welfare as we know it today is relatively new. What did the 50% or 30% do before we decided to rob the productive to reward the unproductive? Do you imagine that any of your clients ever sell their food stamps to buy drugs, alcohl or cigarettes? Assuming most of your clients are women how many have a live in boyfriend who probably buys as much beer and cigarettes as the food stamps does food for the family. That is; does food stamps merely allow the "poor" to indulge their bad habits or is it really necessary for them to survive? In feeling good as a Christian is it necessary that I am also deaf, dumb and blind to the obvious and rampant fraud waste and abuse in the system. Never mind that most who are born into welfare and grow up to be welfare recipients are forever damaged by our obsession with "doing good" and miss the whole purpose in life to succeed and be proud of their accomplishments doesn't it still seem wrong to take from Peter to give to Paula knowing that Paula is lying and cheating to get her "free stuff". In watching the fight in congress over extending the debt ceiling and understanding the real reason we haven't had an actual budget in 5 years do we realize that this enormous hole we have created for ourselves is because of welfare spending gone wild? At what point does destruction of the nation and our childrens future take precedent over supporting bums and their bad habits? Until and unless we figure this out we are doomed to fail.

#3.1.1 GoneWithTheWind on 2013-10-17 10:47 (Reply)

I stick to my 90% because of the high number of people in the last 5 years who have been added to the food stamp and disability rolls. No way are they incapable of working.

In my area, which is a smallish town in the northwest, there are help wanted signs everywhere. A local electrician has more work than he can handle and said that every assistant he has hired ended up being fired because they had drug/alcohol problems or wouldn't show up to work on time or at all.

There is constant turnover in low-wage jobs, but yet a young relative is managing to support himself on a min. wage job that gives him only about 25 hours a week in work.

I think the big problem lies in the young who have children they can't support and can't afford daycare on a min. wage job. However, this is TEMPORARY. Soon enough that baby will be 4 and in pre-school or at least 5 and in kindergarten. There should be no need for years and years of welfare and assistance for someone like that. There should be a finite end to that type of assistance.

I could go on and on. I have seen several people in the last few years who scam the system by having a live-in boyfriend and still receive benefits as if she were living alone. Sometimes the boyfriend is working, sometimes he isn't. But either way that household is being supported by more people than the government knows about. Scam, scam, scam.

#3.1.2 MissT on 2013-10-17 11:05 (Reply)

Giving to someone out of my own abundance establishes a relationship between us that does us both good (assuming I'm not making things worse by, say, enabling a drug habit). When I'm giving my own money I don't trouble myself much over the recipient's "deserts," and of course it's no one else's business. I just think about whether it will make his life better or worse, taking into account how it will change matters between us.

I don't think this experience translates well to the welfare system. The donor not only has done nothing affirmative, but the recipient has not established a relationship with someone who cared about him. The "deserts" issue remains equally irrelevant, I think, and is replaced by a social calculation: we can see with our own eyes what the welfare system does to many families. The only families it seems safe to give public money to are ones with severe disabilities.

AVI, it may well be that 80% of the people you see have severe disabilities, but should we suppose that they are a representative slice of Americans on public assistance?

#3.1.3 Texan99 on 2013-10-17 13:15 (Reply)

Federal welfare (and all federal benevolence programs) are how the democrats keep their slaves. Democrats love their slaves and will do anything to keep them. Welfare is how they keep people broken and dependent.

#4 RelayerM31 on 2013-10-16 18:57 (Reply)

QUOTE:

Christianity, as a late writer has pointed out in words well chosen,* is the only system of socialism which commends it self as having a rational basis, and its founder the most practical teacher of it that the world has ever seen. " The aim of all socialism is the securing of equality in the social condition of mankind, and if equality is to be secured at all it will be secured only by changing the hearts of men, and never by setting to work, in the first instance, upon the conditions." But the present impulse of socialism is not Christian, but rather one willing to put an end to Christianity. And it is a system of machinery, like the kingdom of a tyrant, not of souls, like that of Christ. Now the Christian system did not rest on force at all. It was communistic, but not socialistic, as the word is properly used; for its very essence was the freedom of the individual will.

It is offensive that the Christian charity has been used to promote the welfare state. Pretty much all the many variants of the churches aligned themselves with the socialists and deserve their fate as the socialists turn upon them now.

Just come out with some reform for the lifetime welfare system and see how fast those that attack Christianity as every turn invoke it to try to shame the opposition. The state assumption of the work of charity perverts it and creates parasites who feed off the system for their "work" and have incentive to create as many victims as possible.

#5 JKB on 2013-10-16 20:18 (Reply)

Contribute to .......the poor cancer reasearch the children. "I gave at the IRS"

#6 fiona on 2013-10-17 16:14 (Reply)

Nobody in our society wants anybody go hungry.

The problem I (and most people have) is when you get behind someone in the grocery store who is buying frozen food and Cheetos with an access card (or per a local news story last week - $400 worth of NY strips . . . or the woman I was behind in a convenience store who bought Fiji water and M&M's)

My solution is this: Everyone who needs food assistance will be issued coupons for the following each week:

1 frozen turkey or roasting chicken
10 pounds of potatoes
5 pounds of rice
2 loaves of bread
1 dozen eggs
3 Bags frozen vegetables
a couple of gallons of milk.

Nothing fancy or gourmet - but good sustenance for a family for a week. Boring enough that you eventually want to find work and eat something different.

If you don't have a job - you should have time to cook a turkey. Then you can have sandwiches, soup - turkey omelets - etc. etc.

It seems pretty simple to me - nothing prepackaged - no junk food - no soda - no cigarettes.

Why is it so hard to fix?

JG

#7 jg on 2013-10-17 16:45 (Reply)

It seems pretty simple to me - nothing prepackaged - no junk food - no soda - no cigarettes.

Agreed.

A further point is that with a bread machine, one can bake one's own bread very cheaply. It takes less than five minutes to fill up a bread machine with the ingredients for a loaf of bread. I bought a bread machine on CraigsList for $10.

Periodically we get liberal politicos et al saying that they have tried eating on the $ that food stamps allocate. The result in invariably that they find it impossible to eat a nutritious diet on the $4-$5 per person per day that food stamps allocate.

This is complete balderdash. Anyone who knows how to cook can live quite comfortably on that amount. When you point that out, you get various responses from the libs, such as you can't expect that the poor dears on food stamps should know how to cook.

#7.1 Gringo on 2013-10-18 12:11 (Reply)

It is impossible to fix because the Democrats have no incentive to fix it and the Republicans are incapable of articulating any conservative position without the media making them sound like plantation owners. Look what the media has done to Christianity which is now synonymous with bigotry, intolerance and homophobia. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are both hateful liars, yet the media spends all their time demonizing Ted Cruz. What can we do, I am not ready to give up, but find it all very distressing.

#8 dianainsa (Link) on 2013-10-17 17:19 (Reply)

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Wednesday, October 16. 2013

Theft, welfare, and charity