Welcome to the contemptible authoritarianism of your average smug, self-righteous, shit-for-brains, bleeding-heart and brain-hemmoraging conservative fuckface*.
My post yesterday on dependency triggered an interesting discussion in the comments, and I wanted to follow up on a point I made near the end of the post — regarding the imperative of personal mentoring to help kids and families escape poverty.
Right. The earlier post linked up there explains how if the federal government would cut it out with the socialism, and let the nice, charitable folks who own coal mines run their lives, natives of rural Eastern Kentucky would be living in Galt's Fucking Gulch right now, and they'd be regularly shitting out Hayek Diamonds for the amusement and delight of tourists from such Heartland Enclaves as Cobb County, Georgia.
Gah.
It takes some stones to say "more of them should be thrown into coal mines so they'll learn some self-respect," sure. But our Corner clown has more fetid depths to plumb.
While I was never young and liberal (a few years ago I found my old high-school yearbook and was surprised to see that almost every note mentioned my conservatism — I must have been a lot of fun to be around), I have been young and naïve. And I’ve been most naÏve about poverty and its cures. If I could distil my hard-earned lessons down to one sentence, it would be this: Any program or personal activity that doesn’t account for mankind’s fallen nature will likely fail with any given individual and is certain to fail in the aggregate.
Well, when I was young, I had a heart, and so I was a socialist. And now that I am older, and possessed yet of a head, I am a pissed-off socialist, and fuck any apocryphal Churchill quotes with a cum-drenched cigar.
If I could distil my similar "hard-learned lessons" down to one sentence, it would be that the government can indeed successfully relieve poverty, and God cannot, for the simple reason that the government exists and God fucking doesn't.
Trillions of dollars have been wasted on the notion that people simply need a bit of help to get by, welfare is but a temporary solution to external injustices visited upon the hard-working poor, and that government assistance can only benefit families struggling to make ends meet. Yet how many families must we shatter – how much sickness and disability must we incentivize — before we realize (to paraphrase an excellent book) that helping can (and does) hurt?
Citations (beyond a bullshit not-social science book) omitted.
I'm baffled by the theological determination that the "temporary solution" of "at least you and your kids aren't starving to death" is inferior to the "we should have let you lazy shits croak" perspective. Certain Christian arguments are indeed an ineffable pancake and a melodious source of rare mind-medicating contemplation.
Our disgusting specimen then describes how he and his Church group decided to be nice to two sets of poors. One young poor boy, nobody loved him, was Goofus, and was running a "long-running con" wherein he received "food and clothes," the cad. But then there was a Gallant!
The next year — not much older but much wiser — we intervened to help a different kid. We’ll call him “Bob.” Like many other kids in our church’s youth ministry, he came from a broken home, had absolutely zero financial resources, and his parents were alcoholics. He had had barely passed in high school, but just after graduation, in a moment of personal crisis, he began drinking heavily and disappeared from church. We loved him and couldn’t bear the thought that he’d fall through the cracks. We found him an apartment right by our house and moved him in, but placed strict conditions on our help — conditions that involved not only finding and keeping a job but also spending a lot of time together (dinners, visits, etc.) The goal wasn’t just to give him the means to succeed, but also help him develop the habits and qualities of life that allow a person to live on their own, meet a wife, and raise a family.
By God’s infinite mercy and grace, Bob is doing very well, has a good job, a beautiful wife, and kids who are thriving. In fact, I’m sure he could teach us a thing or two about marriage and parenting (we need all the help we can get).
We gave Bob a leg up.
No. You gave Bob a fucking ultimatum: conform -- or sink, starve, and suffer.
Anf you got off on how he bent to your will, your norms.
Just. Fucking. Admit. It. You. Authoritarian. Fuck.
Your boy "Brian" taught you something FUCKING OBVIOUS TO NON-LOONS about human nature, but... oh forget it. Trying to explain class reality to a wingnut is like trying to explain Twitter to a sunfish.
Glad it worked out for "Bob," but unless you're a sociopath, why on earth do you believe this is the way to Make Life Better for people born into poverty -- eliminate all government safety nets, and make them beg for help like they are puppies you can train? There is a large body of writing on why this approach is doomed and diseased: it is called all of 19th century fiction. Look it up, if your pastor fucking lets you, gob-knocker.
I believe that a nation that says "you have a right not to starve and get sick and die, because you are an American" will lead to a prouder and more productive populace than the "fuck you, wait around for an entitled God-botherer to run your life for you" approach. Call me a fucking FDR Democrat if you fucking insist.
That didn't used to be a surprising or especially radical epithet.
*: In case it is at all unclear, that I called the author of this post a "fuckface" doesn't mean that I dislike him personally. Only his published opinions ought to be regarded as the diseased and disgusting emanations of your classic "fuckface." We remain committed at this blog, as always, to the basic tenets of Civil Discourse, and we likewise remain merely "committed." -- Whiskey Fire management. (Also this post contains a rare exception to our policy of preferring the serial comma, and is done for purposeful rhetorical effect, so shut it, redsnouts.)