Entitlement
/ Welfare Programs
The Cult of the Outstretched Hand Written Feb 07; Updated on 3-20-07
"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." [Samuel Adams]
"I do not choose to be a common man. It is my right to be uncommon—if I can. I seek opportunity—not security. I do not wish to be a kept citizen, humbled and dulled by having the state look after me. I want to take the calculated risk; to dream and to build, to fail and to succeed. I refuse to barter incentive for a dole. I prefer the challenges of life to the guaranteed existence; the thrill of fulfillment to the stale calm of utopia. I will not trade freedom for beneficence nor my dignity for a handout. I will never cower before any master nor bend to any threat. It is my heritage to stand erect, proud and unafraid; to think and act for myself, enjoy the benefit of my creations, and to face the world boldly and say, this I have done. All this is what it means to be an American." [Dean Alfange]
Nutshell: "Entitlements" are benefits that are paid to people. Some are legitimate, some are just plunder. When perpetual Entitlements are paid to an individual or family, it becomes "Welfare." When welfare becomes pandemic, you have a "Welfare State." The Welfare State is synonymous with Socialism. There's no place in America for that.
Those who advocate the Welfare State feel that their list of rights is pretty long, despite the fact that the only innate rights acknowledged by the Constitution (notice I didn't say "provided by") are Life, Liberty, and The Pursuit of "Happy-ness." There are no innate rights to food, education, health care, or cable television. These are all things that people must work for and obtain for themselves...or, at least, that was the original idea.
Does that seem uncompassionate? If so, then consider that these entitlements have to come from somewhere.
Entitlements are paid for by using other people's tax money.
Thus, welfare is not a compassionate program. Rather, it is the practice of plundering your neighbor. More and more, our politicians get into office and stay there by providing entitlements. Doing so enables them to promise things to the voters if the voters will keep electing them. That's why politicians are likely to encourage the formation of the Welfare State - because in that system the people are dependent upon the government, which is the source of the politician's power. It's nothing better than banana-republic vote buying. And we are supposed to be better than that.
But the politician can only wield the power that we give up to him. Said another way, doing so is us giving away our own freedom. Yet the people will often jump on board because it relieves them of much of the burden of fending for themselves. Can you imagine the first settlers or the pioneers doing that? The Welfare State is hardly in keeping with the hearty and robust traditions of our forebearers.
Americans Are Too Good to Settle for Welfare
Yes, they had faults, but our forebearers were BY FAR the hardest-working-est, no-whining-est single community the world has ever seen. Have you ever considered that EVERYONE who resides in America is someone (or is descended from someone) who had enough somewhere else and struck out to make a better life for their family? That's a pretty unique and amazing community. We are too good to settle for the Welfare State.
"The kind of person who is capable of utilizing an opportunity, will not wait until he is given one."
- Marc Heileman
YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT "GOOD INTENTIONS"
Many people will support welfare programs out of a genuinely well-intentioned desire to provide better for the "underpriveledged;" but, whatever the motivations, consider the following ideas:
"To be free means to be free to fail."
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin
"Everywhere there rises before our eyes the specter of a society where security, if it is attained at all, will be attained at the expense of freedom, where the security that is attained will be the security of fed beasts in a stable, and where all the high aspirations of humanity will have been crushed by an all-powerful state." - J. Gresham Machen (1881-1936)
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools. --Herbert Spencer (1891)
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences. --P.J. O'Rourke (1993)
The main problem with the Welfare State is that it burdens the tax and financial system - and will eventually lead to the collapse of the political system - once people learn that they can vote themselves money from the treasury. It is a very common historical pattern, and the main reason that all free societies so far have only lasted about 200 years. That's about how long it tends to take for freedom to lead to democracy; which will in turn lead to the kind of dependency I'm talking about.
Please reference
the following quote from Alexander Tyler. No, he wasn't writing about the United
States. This quote is well over one hundred years old. Tyler was writing about
the fall of the Athenian Republic.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only
exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the
public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the
candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the
result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed
by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has
been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following
sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great
courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance
to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency from complacency to apathy,
from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage."
Welfare Programs HURT the Poor by Providing
An INCENTIVE to BREAK UP THEIR FAMILIES
The way the system is set up now, a welfare recipient gets more money if the father bails out or when another child joins the family. Thus, welfare recipients see having a baby as an opportunity to "get a raise." Of course, this just strains the system that much more. So it is easy to see why the current welfare system has been looked at as blame-worthy for the destruction of the family unit among the poor. Rather than stick together through the tough times, it becomes a viable option to let the family disintegrate in order to get more welfare. Of course, a broken family is statistically much more likely to lead to poverty in the first place...thus perpetuating the whole destructive dependency cycle.
So What Do We Do About All This? See Welfare Reform
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