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Name:
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copperline
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Subject:
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Darwin and the Republic
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Date:
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7/3/2012 2:15:07 PM
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OK, let me see if i can take this & add something
worthwhile. First, a qualifier. i’ve been a social worker all my life and
have worked extensively with people here in Alabama. Some
of them were born poor, some were well-to-do before coming into hard times for
one reason or another. They aren’t all
the same. Thinking back to your Milton
Friedman quote about judging programs by their outcome, not just by their
intentions…. i’ve spend a lot of my time pondering why our best intentions
could create lousy outcomes. it’s true. in a military operation, you would call it collateral
damage, unavoidable side-effects of a larger but necessary action. Public
assistance does seem to encourage dependence followed by an upward spiral of
costs. But what choice do we have? Really, you can’t let people starve or die
from lack of medical care… and you are surely right that people will not
quietly accept that they are on the losing end of some evolutionary process… i sure wouldn’t.
if you believe that the Fog of War makes it hard to
distinguish between friendlies and the bad guys, you should try making the
distinction between the Deserving and the Free-loading in an Emergency Room, or
a school lunch program, or a Food Stamp office. i never was able to tell the
difference. They’re people, not statistics,
when you meet them face to face.
Opponents of public assistance programs refer to the notion
that if these programs were not available, the recipients would simply get
jobs. That sounds pretty simple, and if
it were true would be a great idea. But what happens when there are no jobs, or
if a social problem like too many children, too little education, lack of
transportation, mental illness or medical disability plagues your life? The idea that by disassembling assistance
programs, we somehow simply & painlessly convert large numbers of people
into ‘productive citizens’ completely overlooks the suffering and social instability
that would follow. And i don’t have
confidence that the Free Market will graciously provide for widows and orphans,
the job of providing a social safety net... that job will always have to be provided by us collectively thru the government.
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