Name:   copperline - Subject:   Darwin and the Republic Date:   7/3/2012 2:15:07 PM

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.