02-04-2018, 03:27 AM
(02-03-2018, 08:41 PM)Galen Wrote:(01-30-2018, 01:17 PM)David Horn Wrote:(01-30-2018, 04:19 AM)nebraska Wrote: Were there charities before there were food stamps?
Why should the government steal money from Americans at the point of the gun when the private market can provide food aid?
Because charity is limited and targeted. "Desirable people" get help, "undesirable people" don't.
That is also kind of the point aside from the tax burden of a massive bureaucracy to administer. There are dysfunctional behaviors that I do not want to subsidize or encourage.
I prefer that we have welfare that gets people through bad situations usually not of their own making (at the least, give children a chance) than that people be compelled to make the satanic choice between bondage as a serf and starvation to maintain freedom to the end.
Hunger is not liberty, and it must never be seen as the price of liberty. I have gotten food aid recently due to a handicap after I lost everything while a caretaker for both parents who had costly, degenerative diseases (Parkinsonism and senile dementia).. I have Asperger's syndrome diagnosed at age 60 (which is too late for doing something with it so that I can get away with it), and difficulty in getting and holding jobs because I do not get non-verbal communications, I am physically clumsy, and I cannot link as a team player. In blue-collar work I am an industrial accident waiting to happen. Sure, I have excellent verbal and mathematical skills... but people think that I am a creepy person and confuse me with a dangerous, evil person. I am the most artificial person that you may ever meet; I must put on an acting job to seem normal.
If I get disability I will be able to do some sporadic work for pay and do plenty of volunteer work, as at food pantries. Of course I will canvass for the Democratic Party as I have done in good times and bad -- but that does not quite count as charity. The value of a man has little to do with his ability to earn.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.