I like the welfare state. I've been all over the world, and countries that do not have welfare have children growing up in the streets, or on garbage dumps. While obviously there are people who can live with that comfortably, I am not one of them.
I love the Western democracies, and though their solutions are not perfect, they are much better than what we have had, and what other countries have.
My mother grew up in a slum in Chicago during the depression. Grinding poverty did not make the people she knew more responsible in all cases- it often just made them desperate, and cruel, and turned them to drink, and in my grandmother's case, to prostitution.
You are entitled to think whatever you wish, but when you look at the places with welfare states, and the places without them, ask yourself "Where do I wish to live, and how badly do I desire to see children hurting in the service of my notions of "responsibility"."
Obviously we all answer these questions of how we will treat the least among us differently. I don't know what social class you were in when you grew up before the welfare state. Were you at the bottom, or somewhere in the middle class? |
