a depressing theory.
Here’s why the Welfare State always ends up collapsing under its own weight:
We negate natural selection by letting the crummy genetic material propagate. What’s worse, not only do we allow it to propagate, we let it prosper to the point where it crowds out the more adaptable genetic stock.
It’s not so much that we “allow” the stupid and lazy to breed. You can’t ethically prevent anyone from having kids, and any policy aimed at forcible birth control smacks of eugenics and has “immorality” written all over it. No, the folly of the welfare state is that it shelters the stupid and lazy from the negative consequences of their own choices, and keeps those particular genetic lines from dying off like they would in nature.
We not only don’t discourage them from breeding, we pay them to have offspring. We then proceed to shelter them from every possible bad consequence of their laziness, inability, or stupidity by providing food stamps, free housing, free health care, and little warning stickers on the toasters and blowdriers that tell them not to use those devices in the shower. We foster a culture of altruism where any self-caused misery on the part of the have-nots and know-nots is automatically made the responsibility of the people who didn’t make the same mistakes. We remove most of the incentives for being smart, being productive, and for avoiding decisions that may lead to starvation.
When you reward someone for birthing kids they can’t feed by taking money away from the people who don’t produce more mouths than they can feed, is it a wonder when eventually the first group outnumbers the second? Is it a surprise when the first group figures out they can outvote the other group to keep the honey flowing? In a system where the vote of the non-productive counts as much as the vote of the producer, you’ll eventually and inevitably have fiscal collapse, as the number of contributors gradually shrinks to a point where it will no longer support the number of leeches on the system.
Is this the opinion of a heartless egoist, or that of a realist? Am I just totally off-base for thinking that the current system of dolism has nothing to do with “compassion”, and that it is mathematically and ethically unsustainable?
May 4, 2008 at 7:32 pm
I see the consequences of this every single day in the ER. My tax dollars go to pay for the ER visit of some jobless skank who can’t afford to pay for healthcare but who magically has a 400 dollar cell phone. We’re not forcing people to live through the consequences of their own excesses. It sickens me.
May 4, 2008 at 7:45 pm
No, wingie, your call is cogent and accurate.
But you have to expect to be hated if you say these things. And productives are vastly outnumbered. Vastly.
You will not rise to serve. I am not there. This is what we’ve bought ourselves.
May 4, 2008 at 7:49 pm
[...] which: Marko asks if he’s wrong in thinking that the unlimited free-handouts for the inept, unskilled and [...]
May 4, 2008 at 7:58 pm
If something doesn’t make sense on a small level then it probably doesn’t on a large one. If Cro-Magnon had to shell out double digets of his mammoth meat to slackers he would have starved to death and we would not be here. We have our stupid policies because we’re wealthy enough to maintain them right now without killing ourselves.
May 4, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Marko, please be patient with this one, I’m just using a relevant quote that my dad used a lot that comes to mind whenever I hear about people on welfare.
A quick disclaimer here, I don’t normally pull out bible verses to make a point, but I feel it’s appropriate in this case. Many people who push for the welfare state try to say “But it’s the Christian thing to do, we should take care of the poor”, yada yada yada… However, Christ himself said “The poor will be with you ALWAYS.” I take this to mean that poverty is not solvable by man’s choices or governmental decisions.
And here’s the quote that I always love when people start talking about welfare systems:
2 Thessalonians 3
6In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers, to keep away from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching[a] you received from us. 7For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, 8nor did we eat anyone’s food without paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that we would not be a burden to any of you. 9We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to make ourselves a model for you to follow. 10For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “If a man will not work, he shall not eat.”
Come to think of it, this also would work against people like Al Sharpton and that Wright fellow, wouldn’t it? It initially refers to the ministers of the church not taking food without paying for it.
My dad was a big one for the above phrase… It always pissed him off when people would live off handouts. I have the same attitude. The best thing my dad ever did for me was to teach me to be self-reliant and to take care of myself and my family without depending on Uncle Sugar. I live in FL on 2 acres with a pool, which isn’t bad for a poor dumb hillbilly from WV. If I was able to pull myself from being a 5th grade dropout to being a college graduate with a good career in IT, then I have no sympathy for ANYONE who says they’re not able to make it in this country. Especially after knowing so many people who came here with nothing but the clothes on their backs and worked their way into owning their own businesses.
May 4, 2008 at 10:43 pm
It is not so much about some genes being passed on (the time frame is too short for that), but rather how the kids are raised, i.e. what kind of lifestyle is taught to the next generation.
Anyway, our technological progress is exponential and already so fast that our biological evolution cannot keep up. If we manage to keep our societies going, we will probably eventually replace the human race with an artificial species. Which is a natural phenomenon.
May 5, 2008 at 7:34 am
I must be in an optimistic mood this morning. Permit me to witter.
The provision of a welfare system is only possible to a rich society. This is pretty obvious on a moment’s reflection: a government will only start giving away money once it’s afloat very comfortably on the money it pries from it’s productive populace. I’m fairly certain any government with a welfare system makes a tidy rake-off from the take before passing it out to the “needy”, but that’s just how the things work, I guess.
A welfare system will, yes, engender The Welfare Classes, and by and large I wouldn’t want to share street-space with same. The senese of entitlement, that they’ll pass on generation after generation, is one of the things that putative civilisation brings about. It defies Darwin quite solidly by letting the lazy, thick and so on breed, where in the woods and the fields they’d either change their ways or die out pretty quickly. I imagine the number of people living on welfare who really need to are a minority, though that’s my innate cynicism at work.
But a rich society can afford to carry the load, for the sake of that minority who genuinely have hit on hard times, and who, having had their turn at the public teat while they re-train, re-group and reorganise will once again turn into productive members of society, and pay back what they’ve had from their tax money, and then more atop it.
I concur with your basic premise that governments taking money from it’s productive civillians under the threat of violence is wrong. It reduces the incentive for folk to better themselves by steepening the gradient between poverty and affluence. It’s also immoral: what’s immoral for one person to do is immoral for a group to do. In this case, take your money by threat of force.
However, that ain’t the world we live in, and without vapourising DC and starting afresh, there’s no way a system of government that doesn’t live off taxing it’s employers will happen. Given our current system, some level of welfare system is inevitable. And hey - as stated, once in a while it’s bound to prop up someone who genuinely needs it, and who gets back on the wheel when they can. The main thing is… America can afford it. Despite eight years of hideous financial mismanagement, Americans are among the wealthiest folk on the planet.
And where you’ve got riches, you’ll get freeloaders. Same where where you’ve got horse-apples, you’ll get flies. It’s a symptom of an affluent society, the way I see it.
Certainly seems that way, as off the top of my head I can’t think of a single first-world gubment that doesn’t hand out dole-cheques.
May 5, 2008 at 7:36 am
Perhaps this is just another way of saying the same thing:
“If you tax something, you get less of it. If you subsidize something, you get more of it.”
Every since FDR trashed the Constitution, and then hugely enhanced with LBJ’s “Great Society” programs, we’ve been increasingly subsidizing the production of of children from single mothers. Surprising only the idiots, this has led to a huge increase in the number of single mothers.
Corporate and farm welfare (subsidies) have also been increased…the latest rage of ethanol from corn is just the icing on the cake, with huge unintended consequences for both food prices and the destruction of the environment through the usage of otherwise marginal farmland.
At the same time, we’ve been taxing the daylights out of every productive entity, whether that entity was a profit-producing small company, corporation, or individual. Once again surprising only the idiots, more and more people have chosen to become net consumers rather than producers.
All told, government at various levels (city, county, state, federal) now consumes something like 1/3 of the GNP. When that level hits 50%, will we have reached the toppling point? It’s at that point that the parasites outnumber the producers. What’s left of the partially capitalist system this country started with will be subsumed, and we might be able to stumble along on it’s remnants for a while. We appear, as a world, to be headed to where countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela have already gone.
May 5, 2008 at 8:50 am
Marko, your front page formatting is screwed up - the blue background overlaps the text, making it unreadable.
May 5, 2008 at 9:35 am
I like Phillips quote from the bible. i think its a tricky thing and a dangerous subjsect to speak about. I work at a grocery store and there is a card called ebt. this ebt card is like a credit card except the user is not getting the bill we are. this ebt card get free money and a good a amount every month or week. I see children come in daily and purchase loads of candy and soda with the ebt. I see their parents come in and buy trash amd the ask for $200 cash back to send it on what ever maybe a new pair of jordans or something from the guy on the corner.
I feel that i have been blessed by God so much and that I should give to others. I hate seeing the people who give welfare a bad name but what can we do about it? Even if you create a brilliant plan to fix this you know there’s a buch of dumb corrupt pollititians who will say NO. Sometimes its not about what they do with the money that you give them its about giveing it to them. And again i agree with Phillips quote and i think we should at least atempt to creat a system that would prevent people who dont work with benifits.
May 5, 2008 at 9:37 am
I think the movie “Idiocracy” sums up the best the direction our welfare system is leading us.
May 5, 2008 at 10:15 am
Try the root beer cool aid, tastier.
You miss the corpate welfare.
May 5, 2008 at 10:15 am
corporate welfare
May 5, 2008 at 11:15 am
batguano: Corporate welfare has pretty much precisely the same effect in terms of allowing businesses that would otherwise fail to continue to stumble on.
Marko: I think you’ve got it precisely. Good luck avoiding the pitchforks for daring speak the truth, though.
I’ve suggested elsewhere an idea for not letting anyone who gets paid by the government (except possibly military personnel, but I’m not even set on that one) to vote. At the very least, this prevents government employee unions and the welfare classes from unduly influencing the forced largesse of those who actually produce.
(And yes, I realize there are a lot more problems this doesn’t solve. I’m as much a fan of the free market as any man, which is why I realize that a lot of the “rich” do steal from the rest of us, through paying for the enactment of laws that hamper the workings of the free market.)
May 5, 2008 at 11:23 am
This is basically what Theodore Dalrymple (sp?) talks about in his observations of the developing British underclass. The British system has, in effect, locked a group of people’s best interests into an (at best) non-productive, (at worst) criminally vicious lifestyle.
May 5, 2008 at 1:03 pm
perlhaqr-
That plan only is fair if you think that the people who are receiving money from the government:
1 do not provide anything of service to the taxpayer
2 do not themselves pay taxes, or alternatively, are not permitted to have a sy in where their own tax money goes
May 5, 2008 at 2:22 pm
So what about disadvantaged blacks in big cities who have never had a chance to get out of the situation they’ve been in, and have been in the same place or worse despite everything because they were put into slavery and then had to deal with massive racism, and still do to some extent? Bootstraps is a horrible argument.
May 5, 2008 at 3:07 pm
Hooray for your thoughts! Totally agree with you this is also happening in my country
May 5, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Had that same thought two months ago.
http://tinyurl.com/6nxvh3
We are paying people to be irresponsible.
It was not a fun realization.
May 5, 2008 at 4:41 pm
robertson, you’re a nitwit.
THERE ARE NO SLAVES ANYMORE. Haven’t been for generations. Black people get free education just like the rest of us. If they can’t take advantage of this, IT’S THEIR OWN DAMN FAULT. Unfortunately, they have a culture that encourages crappy behavior. “Acting white”, thugs, gangsta culture, all contribute to FAIL.
In fact, i think most racism stems from this ridiculous attitude that they’re “owed” something, and everyone else should pay the tab.
I don’t believe in the superiority of any race but i do believe in the superiority of cultures, and theirs sucks.
May 5, 2008 at 4:52 pm
robertsonm,
Blacks aren’t in a bad situation because of racism and slavery, it’s because of govt. programs mainly championed by Democrats, start getting rid of those and they’ll do better.
May 5, 2008 at 5:05 pm
from what patrick buchanan writes in “the way our world ends” all of this is moot, though i agree with the premise entirely.
according to buchanan’s cited study by “the national policy institute”, the growth, demands, and appetites of third-world populations will devour and/or control virtually all of the world’s productive population within about fifty years…
immigration is to the welfare state as gasoline is to a fire…
jtc
May 5, 2008 at 5:19 pm
I loved your article, and the first comment
May 5, 2008 at 5:20 pm
The problem with rants like this is that the assumptions are always wrong. There are not vast numbers of useless people on welfare. Most people on welfare are on there temporarily between jobs, or are mothers whose husbands abandoned their children. The numbers of people who fall into the category or stupid or lazy and are receiving some sort of government benefit are very small, and do not contribute to the problems you assign them. Their numbers are too small to impact the gene pool significantly, or to have any significant effect on the economy. Most people are working, and contributing to society. The attempt to blame welfare recipients always fails, because it is always an attack on a very small and insignificant part of the enormous waste of money by government and the well-educated, well-bred bureaucracy.
May 5, 2008 at 5:23 pm
And, oddly enough, in the USA, we have just seen the largest government growth in a century, under a Republican administration, whereas the previous, Democratic administration actually shrunk the size of the federal government. So, getting rid of Democrats is not going to have effect on the problems.
May 5, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I didn’t say a damn thing about Democrats.
And I’m not just talking about welfare. More than half of the federal budget now goes to entitlement payouts. If you figure in Social Security, which is kept out of the annual budget and run “off the books”, it’s closer to three quarters. And the baby boomers are just now starting to retire…
We cannot sustain the current entitlement system. It’s simple mathematical fact. It will collapse under its own weight in the next few decades.
May 5, 2008 at 5:39 pm
It starts when you’re in school that people who are dumb get the benefits. Kids are more likely to be cared for when having trouble with the school material: Classes for intellectually challenged kids exist, but advanced classes for highly gifted children are a “waste of money” because “they’ll make it anyway.” So saddening.
May 5, 2008 at 5:53 pm
So, this is what passes for an intelligent conversation in the new media. Soak the rich.
May 5, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Hm. When I was in grade school it was the smart kids who got the programs and the fun. The “challenged” kids (to avoid being specific) got stuck together in slower classes with the less desirable teachers. And this was public school. So if you were already gonna make in, then you were REALLY gonna make it, and if you were going to have to work harder for it, they gave you more crap to overcome. The contrast in middle school was so shocking that I was keenly aware of it every day, even at 12 or 13. Just my experience at the time.
I heard an interesting interview on the radio this weekend - I don’t recall who/where, but what he said was interesting. In summary: Throughout history, the poor have always at least had nature to support them. Even if you were dirt-poor, you could go live under a tree, eat some mushrooms, drink in the stream, etc. Now that everything is owned, the poor can’t take care of themselves as easily anymore.
I’m not endorsing the theory one way or the other, but it made me think.
I suppose the point is that you can’t really go all My Side Of The Mountain anymore, and in his case those woods were, in fact, his family’s.
(Yes, I like the story where the kid in NYC runs away to the woods. Go figure.)
-E
May 5, 2008 at 10:10 pm
Sadly, not all schools benefit the gifted children. Since I am talking about European schools, though, I guess it would be pretty off topic.
May 6, 2008 at 10:40 am
It’s not an “entitlement” if you have already paid for it. Other people here have blamed the political party of their choice, so I was responding to them.
May 6, 2008 at 12:01 pm
O’Maolchathaigh,
Do you mean to tell me that the party selling welfare and affirmative action due to supposed white racism are the Republicans?
Just because Bush has been spending worse than a drunken sailor doesn’t mean the democrats haven’t been all about govt. dependence since FDR. The Democrats have opposed efforts at Social Security privatization, perferring to continue the disasterous system with a certain implosion. They were the ones who decided to push for the prescription drug program that Bush caved in on, they’re the ones who most staunchly opposed and continue to oppose meaningful welfare reform, they push affirmative action.
That does not excuse Republicans who might go along with it due to political expediency but it is beyond dispute that democrats are all about redistribution. Also, I can introduce you to quite a few career welfare collectors who’ve never had an actual job, it’s also kind of ironic that they’re big supporters of the Democratic party.
May 6, 2008 at 2:11 pm
DiveMedic saith:
That plan only is fair if you think that the people who are receiving money from the government:
1 do not provide anything of service to the taxpayer
2 do not themselves pay taxes, or alternatively, are not permitted to have a sy in where their own tax money goes
Most government employees don’t do anything I consider a “service”. In fact, many of them do jobs I actively wish they’d stop doing.
I have no objection to those employees having a say in where their tax money goes. I have a strong objection to them having a say in where my tax money goes, especially if one of the possible options is “their pocket”.
I don’t really care too much about “fair”, frankly. I care about people not being able to vote themselves a raise at my expense. Actually, I suppose now that I think about it, that pretty much is my definition of “fair”.
May 7, 2008 at 11:23 am
Eat the rich. Fuck ‘em too.
May 12, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Sorry, I have to disagree on one point: “forcible” birth control.
There’s nothing — NOTHING — forcible about us, as a society, saying “if you want welfare, line up for Norplant.” Or, in the alternative, “You can pick up your check right after your shot.”
You (the recipient) have every right to decline the shot, therefore you have not been “forced” into anything. Coerced? Perhaps, but I have no problem with it.
There is nothing whatsoever immoral about us, as a society, saying “so long as you’re consuming and not producing, we’re going to take steps to ensure that you don’t produce more mouths for us to feed.”
This isn’t “eugenics” — we’re not PERMANENTLY sterilizing them. The shots are temporary, no more harmful than any other form of birth control, can’t be “forgotten” as a pill could be, leave no scars — it’s as simple as “come in once a month and get your shot before you pick up your check.”
We should have done this a long time ago.
Want to be free to breed? Don’t ask for welfare. That was easy.
BTW, I also advocate a lifetime-limit — perhaps 5 years — for welfare. During that time, we’ll also pay for you to learn a trade, after which you go to work. “Can’t” find a job? We will find something for you to do. After scraping up road-kill for a few days, McD’s will look pretty good. Drop out of or FLUNK out of school? Off you go.
In any case, once you’ve worn out your welcome in the welfare office, your kids will go to someone who wants them and will raise them with a work-ethic. Breed all you want, we’ll see them raised by people who won’t raise them in the culture of laziness.
DD
DD
May 12, 2008 at 5:06 pm
PS: My daughter just told me that making people work in exchange for a welfare check is “slavery.” Her teacher said so.
Ms. Teacher and I will be having a talk, similar to the one Daughter and I just had.
Demanding someone work for a living is slavery?
What do you call taking the fruits of MY labor and giving them to someone who did nothing to earn them?
As usual, liberal “logic” is bass-ackward.
DD