I agree with you Becker about entitlements. Problems I have with entitlements: A. In many cases those who have been on welfare take in more from the government than those who opt to rough it on their own with lower paying jobs.
B. Human nature. Here in Wisconsin we began "Welfare to Work" recently and when people came to the realization that they had to sign up for jobs to be given them after so many months on welfare, a great number of them left the program or declined to apply. I wonder why?
C. Welfare encourages crime and fraud. There is a notorious couple in my area who've been on welfare for years and their kid is out driving flashy vehicles dealing drugs. The labor market up here is tight. They could get jobs! Social service apparently could care less.
D. Money thrown at a problem is money thrown away. Remember LBJ and his "Guns & Butter" program? Scores of rowhouses were built across the country to house the poor. What the bozos who dreamt up this dogooder scheme (and who would never have lived themselves in such dwellings) didn't realize was that people are people and not animals to be assigned cages or chucked into holes. The apartments were shoddy, cramped together, and in some cases windowless. They had no gardens or back yards. I've seen the patchwork barrios of Guatemala City and Bogota, Colombia, and even there the poorest of the poor have a courtyard or backyard and small garden, and windows to the world. LBJ's rowhouses became conduits of crime and many if not most have already been condemned and demolished. You might just as well have dumped the money spent on them in the Atlantic Ocean for all the good it did. The money spent on those rowhouses was borrowed, by the way, so we're still paying for them.
This all is not coming from one born with a silver spoon in his mouth. In 1980 I borrowed $45 and with that and the clothes on my back hitched a ride to Western Wisconsin with a friend, did odd jobs and sat 2 months behind on my rent until I got a job on a farm where I milked 500,000 cows before I could pay off my debts and make it through school. So I know what the end of the rope is like too. I'm not saying every government program is evil, but private charity seems to be more answerable to its patrons than government entitlements.
--AG |
