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Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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September 14, 2003
Struggling is an outrage
Al Hunt, the most reliably liberal member of CNN's Capital Gang, had a revealing choice for his Outrage of the Week on the September 13, 2003 show.
Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania Senator who recently likened gay behavior to bestiality is at it again. In opposing additional childcare funds for poor welfare-to- work participants, he argued, according to the Los Angeles Times, "making people struggle a little bit is not necessarily the worst thing."
At the same time, he has championed every tax cut and every tax break for the rich. Santorum believes in the class struggle as long as it's only the poor who struggle.
As a libertarian, I oppose government welfare programs for a number of reasons, but I can understand some of why people would support them. Human empathy makes you want to alleviate suffering, and help the needy. That's reasonable.
However, you have to work with a reality principle. Giving out welfare works against our overall economic health in obvious ways that no intelligent person could miss. For starters, the more the government hands out, the less motivation people have to do things for themselves. This applies to me, you, and everyone else.
Also, the more stuff the government gives away, the more someone else has to be taxed to pay for it. Higher taxes result in less motivation from the other end. If I can get $200 a week for not working, or $400 to work- minus $100 in taxes- then I'm only really making $2.50 an hour. I'd be DUMB to do that.
You might support SOME government welfare programs anyway. You may calculate that ameliorating the worst suffering in society is so important that we'll just have to accept some damage to our basic capitalist incentive structure.
Nonetheless, you must accept that we are in fact making a tradeoff, and take that into account. Our good feelings about alleviating suffering come at some expense of lower overall societal economic health.
Many liberals such as Al Hunt seem to regard the necessity of struggle as an affront against human dignity and even against justice. It's not FAIR that anyone has to struggle. It's an outrage even to suggest that there might be benefit to having to "struggle a little bit" by not getting yet one more set of handouts.
Thing is, LIFE isn't fair. Struggle is the essence of life. Overcoming obstacles is how we achieve ANYTHING. Necessity is the mother of invention. Suffering and hardship are not FUN, but they can be tremendously motivational like nothing else.
You can't change that by passing more laws. You might as well have congress try to change the law of gravity.
posted by Al at 9/14/2003 11:18:00 PM
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