(no subject)

[serene]

My sister-in-law posted (and agreed with) an article saying that people on welfare should be drug-tested first. I know it's stupid to argue with conservatives. I did it anyway, and got myself all worked up. I need to not do that shit.

Anyway, I hope that if my brother ever loses his job or otherwise can't provide for their family, she applies for welfare if she needs it, and that We The People won't make her pee on a stick before she can get the money to feed her eight children.

Comments

[snippy]

It sucks when I get drawn into an argument I know will end with me feeling negative (bad/sad/angry/whatever). Sorry that happened to you.

I wish I could tell your sister I'm not happy she thinks my sister and I should be dead, because it was only welfare/food stamps/surplus government food/free school lunch that fed the two of us far too many weeks of our childhood (entire months, sometimes), and my mother would never have passed the drug tests (we were living with a drug dealer at the time!) so we would have died of starvation. Even with help, it was close: we both have longterm medical issues attributed to childhood nutrition inadequacies.

The problem I see in her reasoning (and an argument I've had with just about every libertarian I've ever met) is allowing a separate political entity to suffer consequences attributed to the choices of the first political entity. That is, maybe the adults don't deserve help but because the adults have the children, YOU ARE PUNISHING THE CHILDREN for choices they had no control over. And sacrificing one human being in order to punish another is not one of the core beliefs of most conservatives or libertarians.

I used to struggle with the desire to only feed the children (like having kids-only free cafeterias!), but even bad parents can be good for kids in some hard-to-determine way, so now I feel like you do about them getting welfare.

[hitchhiker]

and this is one big reason why the libertarian argument that the government should not be in the welfare business and that private charities can handle it falls on its face. it would be "the deserving poor" all over again.

[merielle]

*hug* I hear ya.

[flarenut]

I think that the impulse to punish the poor for being poor is almost directly proportional to the level of repressed fear about economic conditions in society at large. If Those People are destitute because of their bad choices or their moral shortcomings, then it follows that Good People Like Us are not really just a couple of paychecks away from losing everything. (Sort of the same kind of "reasoning" that leads to the whole evil craziness about the supposedly blameworthy behavior of rape victims.)

Because if They are just like Us, then what happened to them could happen to us, and that doesn't bear thinking about.

(If making bad decisions were the main thing it took to end up in need of public assistance, I sure as hell wouldn't be sitting on this nice chair behind my grandfather's desk typing away.)