If the Gov't stripped welfare, what would happen?

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It is an arrogant misnomer to think you've "earned your own keep". I call BS.

This idea that you "earn" your right to exist is as much a social construct as the the idea of societal obligation which you reject. You can't special plead for the "truth" of one social construct while you reject others on the grounds that they are "mere social constructs". According to nature you don't earn anything. You've earned nothing. You exist. That's it.

Luckily only a small fraction of people share your selfish mentality or humanity would comprise of bands of warring hunter-gatherer tribes to this day.

Actually within small hunter-gatherer communities a high degree of cooperation and support is required. Indeed from what I've read, within this context occur the only examples where something resembling communism actually works, and works well. It's when you get larger groups, and then "civilisation" that things start to break down. Warring generally occurs where there is competition for resources, and that's not much different to today, except we kill millions at a time for causes that often mean nothing to the individuals expected to die. I suggest the average person had a much better quality of life 20,000 years ago than the average person today.

Having said that I do have sympathy for Ruveyn's position. Personally I feel no obligation to what is considered "society" today in the country I live. That society is being flooded with rejects from the third world who i'm expected to feed and house through taxation of my labour; and to add insult to injury that taxation also schools their multiple offspring. Frankly it makes me sick.

Shantytowns, street vendors everywhere, scavengers and markets selling plastic and scrap metal on the streets, shoe shine boys. More beggars, people having their legs sawed off to improve begging revenues. More gated communities.

Lots more prostitution, sex slavery, slavery in general. Sharecropping, debt peonage, indentured servitude.

If USA scrapped welfare safety net completely, American perverts won't have to go to Thailand for some children to service them.

Organ harvesting would be a growth industry under the Republican Teabaggers too. Voluntary (as one can say desperate people want to part with their organs) as well as involuntary (Gangs carving people up for money).

In other words, a Teabagger paradise.

Look at Chile under Pinochet in the 70s to find your answer (before he went away from the excessively free market policies that didn't work). Massive increases in poverty, increasing gap between rich and poor (some benefitting as they always do), widespread torture and suppression of human rights required to prevent people from protesting and overthrowing the government.

It is evident, if people have nothing, they will stop at nothing to get something. They will fight rather than die and the only way to keep them down will be imposing a police state to spread fear and terror. Police state means in the end less freedom for everybody (apart from those at the very top of course, and even they will be scared of being overthrown by their immediate subordinates).

I pretty much have to agree with zer0netgain and ruveyn on this.

Government programs and even government programs contracted out to private industry are way more into perpetuating themselves and expanding than doing their actual task.
In fact, their actual function is often (to put it conservatively) lost in all the bureaucracy, infighting and internal empire building that goes on. More money goes into admin costs than into the end product and those bureaucrats find ways to justify it.
This is personal experience speaking.

As others have said; it is NOT a right to receive government assistance for anything having to do with ones individual needs. Not in what is supposed to be a free country, anyway.
Nor is it the place of government to extort money from the citizens to fund these social programs that are outside the responsibility of government.

This is not to say that we can get by without government programs of any kind. A county this size cannot but those programs need to be very limited in power, quantity, size, and scope of operations for the good of all.

The abolition of welfare, as a Matter of Principle, will inevitably cause more economic instability, increase the possibility of panics and collapses, will make epidemics more likely, will waste millions of individuals, will cause the country to be a worse place to live. If that's a price to pay for Principles then perhaps those principles are not the right ones.

That sounds sort of like Victorian England meets District 9 without the space prawns.

It also sounds not very far fetched at all. I'd also add child labour in general, not just child prostitution.

Of course, kids don't have a 'right' to school. You aren't exempt from earning your keep just because you're 6 years old. </sarcasm>

Fires, let's not forget fires. More people would have to make do with unconventional methods of heating and there'd be thrown together hovels that don't fit the fire code. There'd be many fires. In the 1970s in the name of Fiscal Responsibility conservatives arranged to burn down parts of major cities in what was called Planned Shrinkage. This was done by withdrawing fire service from targeted areas and encouraging landlords to put it up in flames.

It's not just "brown people" who rely on government assistance. How convenient it is to use your prejudice as a justification to separate yourself from the burden of having empathy for others. Maybe you don't realize this but "society" is actually made up of individuals with feelings and needs just like yours. No offense, but miserly scrooges like yourself and your pal Ruveyn make me sick. Sick enough that I might just hurl upon your shoes if I ever had the misfortune to bump into you in person.

The main beneficiaries of our welfare system are large tax funded, tax subsidized corporations. They are the true "welfare Queens".

And I am miserly. My money is mine and your money is yours and lets keep it that way.

ruveyn

Seeing eye dogs and recorded material.

ruveyn

Conservatism at work



The Planned Shrinkage experiment going as planned.

The wreckage picture there used to be public housing which was reduced to rubble by the people who lived in it.

ruveyn

In case you weren't paing attention, nobody is talking about "corporate welfare" in this thread. I'm not going to just let you change the subject with your ridiculous equivocation.

What makes you think I want to touch your smelly grubby money?

Last edited by marshall on 24 Oct 2010, 5:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Gosh, I'd never have pegged you for being so old. Sorry if that sounds personal, but I'm really surprised.

What exactly (and where) is this and how did it come about?