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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (742705)	9/30/2013 1:54:06 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1577993

>> but then there are people who are not screwing around and need food stamps to survive. I doubt anyone really needs food stamps to survive. It undoubtedly makes life easier for some people (while making life harder for those who will have to pay for them). People are resourceful when they have to be. When you give them free money, their ability to become resourceful is limited. I understand that you have a hard time wrapping your head around the notion that people need food stamps to survive. I know you have chosen to ignore the numerous studies and the article I posted recently saying quite the opposite. Why? Because it suits you and not because of any facts that are brought to bear on the subject.

To: i-node who wrote (742705)	9/30/2013 5:52:05 AM
From: Taro	3 Recommendations Recommended By FJB joseffy TideGlider Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577993

My buddy Bob actually came up with this on food stamps etc some time ago, /Taro "Many laws of nature can be violated at great hazard only. Similar to Newton's third law of mechanics (action equals a re-action of same size), there is an equivalent law of economics (and human nature): If you give a person something, you always take something back, it is thus required by Mother Nature. Welfare payments to indigent people make an excellent example. When government gives money to people, gov't takes back SOMETHING from them. If nothing else (as is usually the case at present), the thing taken back is a portion of the recipients self-respect and incentive to better themselves. So what happens? They take the "donation", spend it as they feel appropriate, and spend their spare time looking for the easiest way to generate even more tax-free income for themselves. Running drugs, burglaries, generating more children out of wedlock (because they enlarge the effective welfare receipts) are good examples). And they have PLENTY of spare time, because they don't spend time doing any kind of work in compensation for the largess they receive from gov't. The result is that we get more and more people looking for new and/or "better" ways to get on the welfare gravy train. Their incentives are almost 100% directed toward the gov't gravy train. MUCH of this problem could be solved quickly and easily, simply by making welfare payments available only to people who are willing to work to get them. Fields could be provided all over the country, where holes could be dug by some welfare recipients, and filled in by others. Over and over. A silly example perhaps, in some ways, but it illustrates the point. If such "opportunities" were available to anyone needing income for basic necessities, they could make their own choice, like use their "spare time" to dig holes for a minimal compensation, or look in private industry for a better opportunity. Now you are taking something back in exchange for gov't largess: Labor. Suddenly, the entire mindset about welfare payments would change its orientation. Honest evaluations (and choices), for the first time for many, would start getting made by people who heretofore had never even BEGUN to think about employment in private industry. The principles IMHO are not arguable. Only the details need to be worked out, to the greatest benefit to society at large. Of course the government bureaucracies already in place to implement our clearly failing welfare programs will howl in protest, coming up with all kinds of reasons why nothing should be changed, especially in a direction that might threaten the need for many of these bureaucrats. That is something that always happens when a bureaucrat's position is threatened. But this process must be implemented anyway, or you can be sure we will get even more of what we have now - large bureaucracies at all levels of government, more and more people encouraged to get on the welfare gravy train, and greater and greater stress on society throughout the entire country. (Of course there must be special provisions made for people who truly cannot work, or truly cannot travel to a place of "welfare work". But that is a problem only in the details, and in reality applies to a minimum of the welfare recipients involved. The ruling principle is still to take something back for what is now so freely given by government.) To expect self-supporting tax-payers to work for their living, while providing absolutely free income to people who do not work at all, makes no sense to Mother Nature, and results in the welfare and societal mess we live with at present. Natural Law cannot be overridden by government, at least not without ghastly consequences.