Nu Labour's Welfare State destoys all it touches
As a staunch opponent of the Welfare State & the dependency culture that has created at our expense, I can do nothing but agree with Jamie Whyte, writing in The Times today:
Oddly, for a Labour Party in a nation that believes Marx to be history’s greatest philosopher, it has forgotten one of his most important teachings: the way we live is determined by the economic arrangement of society. There is so much antisocial behaviour in Britain because the values that might prevent it have lost their economic value.
Why do parents instil in their children habits of hard work, self-restraint and consideration for others? Perhaps they believe these values to be intrinsically worthwhile. But they also have an economic interest in raising wellbehaved children. If your child grows up to be an unemployable slob, he will be an economic burden on the family.
Or, at least, he would have been in the past. Now, the economic burden is spread across all taxpayers. The same goes for teenage pregnancy. The families of the little twits who create the baby do not have another mouth to feed: taxpayers do.
The welfare policies pursued by successive governments in Britain and all around the Western world have the same effect. They transfer the economic cost of bad habits from the miscreants and their families to taxpayers. By reducing the cost of bad habits, these policies also reduce families’ incentive to resist them. This incentive, along with the cost, has been transferred to taxpayers. But since the cost is spread thinly, no individual taxpayer feels the incentive very strongly. And even if he did, there would be nothing he could do about it. Taxpayers cannot raise other people’s children.
These taxpayer funded handouts have done more to wreck families & destroy our country than anything else, except possibly lawyers.
Comments
Taxpayers cannot raise other people's childeren, yet we do have to employ teracers who are exected to do just that, ye gods... Somedays all we can do is be glad public sector workers are so underpayed.
Posted by: The Alchemist | July 26, 2005 11:53 AM
Jamie Whyte hits the nail on the head. Politicians and their hand-outs create the problem. The solution is to stop the hand-outs (and while we're at it a few more armed shopkeepers and passers-by would do wonders on the "consideration for others" front). But what to they do instead? ASBOs, curfews, ID cards, CCTV and bloody neighbourhood wardens, that's what.
Posted by: Rob Fisher | July 26, 2005 3:09 PM