There is a comment in moderation I haven’t yet decided to liberate. It’s from a new commenter and I don’t think he’s a troll.
Or at least trolls rarely write wiffy-waffing walls of text that start by accusing me of either lying or being wrong (about an obvious point at that) and then proceeds to do the appeasing two-step ending in how he thinks we should have a social safety net. It reads in fact completely and bizarrely idiotic, in the way only a very smart person fed on disingenuous pap his entire life can sound stupid.
But the person self-identifies as a socialist and my assistant strenuously objects to freeing his comment, since she says no one practices the arcane art of the flounce, anymore, and we’ll end up having to block him. And because I am exhausted, I’ll defer to her. (Exhausted: turns out not just the last step on the marbelizing but the one before were a mistake. You see, having done the marbelizing proper (I’m good at painting marble-like substances) I found myself leery of doing the final step in epoxy, so I chose “layers of polyurethane instead” (Lacquer not indicated, since it’s a bedside table, CPAPs leak, and I occasionally slap my water glass instead of grabbing it.) Apparently high humidity and temperatures in the nineties mean that the polyurethane, being a plastic, remains soft. Since the intermediate steps involve sanding, and removing the mistaken coat definitely needs sanding, what happened is that I tried to sand and the whole turned into a gummed mess. I had to bring out the hot gun. In this weather! It’s now been scraped, sanded bare, and I made interim arrangements, so I can do both bedside tables at the same time since I’ll have to mix epoxy for the final step, and I only want to do it once. (I HATE working with epoxy. I can’t tell you how much.) Anyway, extensive sanding and heat gun left me beat.)
The mistake/lie he thinks I made is that “Socialists don’t want things to get worse.” Right. Lenin saying “The worse the better” was just a bleep. And by the way, don’t try to tell me communism isn’t socialism. The USSR called itself socialist, so did the DDR and so does every other tinpot communist dictatorship in the world. BUT if someone is stupid enough to claim Lenin wasn’t socialist, then they must think socialists are the word’s dumbest life forms, outsmarted by a paramecium because wanting to open the borders and bring in the third world, (I’m not saying people from the third world are bad. But they come from dysfunctional cultures and have no skills we need in our present society.) wanting to incentivize crime (not punishing crime is incentivizing it, unless you believe every criminal is secretly an angel. Also, for the love of Bob, this experience has been run again and again and again. The way to combat serious crime is to disproportionately punish trivial crimes, not the other way around) wanting to strangle energy and wanting to turn us into a command economy (again proven over and over again not to work) is to want to create disorder and destroy everything. I don’t care what pretty lies one tells to cover it up. That’s what socialists want.
But it was his soft landing of “We need a social net” that kept me awake last night. (And I really can’t afford to be kept awake just now.) It’s what people say when they want to appease the socialists. Hell, the mess we’re in, the whole welfare state and the bizarre “mixed economy” bullshit was an attempt to appease the socialists/communists so they wouldn’t destroy everything. It’s why the Victorians went soppy on “helping the poor and educating the benighted” and it’s why country after country has tied itself with velvet ropes, in the attempt to keep the commies from killing everyone and destroying everything.
It doesn’t work. Communists and socialists can’t be appeased. What they want is not what they say they want. What they claim worries them is not what worries them. Creating a social net is admitting that they’re right and the poor need the government to steal from those who have and give to them. Once you concede that, you’re like the prostitute who will only put out for a million dollars. You’ve already admitted what you are. You’re just quibbling on the price.
Quickly, what really — passionately — concerns socialists is that other people have more than THEY THEMSELVES do. Yes, they say they’re concerned about the poor. But talk to any one of them long enough, and the spittle-flecked rant comes out where they will scream that Elon is so rich, why isn’t he feeding all of Africa. Since only a fool or a knave will claim that someone can feed a continent indefinitely, it soon becomes obvious they just hate the fact someone is that wealthy. It bothers them. They’ll rant about inequality, etc. but what bothers them is that others have more than they do. And this is because the very wealthy can ignore them and evade their killing commands. And since at the heart of every statist is a dirty greed for power, this will not be tolerated. The rich must be brought down and they and the poor all made uniformly wretched and in need for the dole dispensed by government, which will, of course, be dispensed by our socialists. (In their dreams. In fact the most ruthless of them end up in power, and everyone else ends up in mass graves. But the dear socialists never see that. They’re blinded by their dreams of unlimited power over the lumpen masses.) Note the commenter that left the wall of text is going to object strenuously to it, and by doing so prove himself either disingenuous or deluded. Either a knave or a useful idiot. (I’m going to be on useful idiot, but I could be wrong.)
Now let’s tackle the whole idea of social net. I’m against.
Note this doesn’t mean I’m against “helping the poor.” Except at our most strapped, where $5 meant I didn’t know where the next meal was coming from, we alot money from our income for helping those who need it. Some of it we even do through extremely well researched charitable organizations. (Few. Look, organizations fall to organizational blinkeredness. Not only do they tend to be taken over by dear blinkered socialists, but they also don’t seem to understand the concept of different cultures. Look up the many misfires and stupidities of the Heifer project for elucidation.) Most of the help we give is personal, close-up and involves … well…. sometimes very strange things. Like, in the nineties Dan and I bought an average of a serviceable computer once every three months. No, our computers weren’t that bad. It was that when we heard of a friend who was a writer and either doing it long hand because they couldn’t afford a computer or whose computer had just died, we got him/her on. Sometimes we even gave it to them (when Dan knew he’d need to be tech support) instead of ding dong ditching by putting it on the door step, ringing the doorbell and driving away like some sort of deranged tech fairies. In the same vein, Dan would buy and repair computers, then put them in the classifieds (later craigslist) for a ridiculously low price, like $20. In that way, we furnished computers to single mothers whose kids needed them for school, to young couples who needed one for accounting or something, etc. (Why not put them for free? Because that attracted people wanting to get them to sell. We tried and found that out.)
We also of course offer more conventional help, like money for a month’s rent or moving expenses. When we can. Or a bag of groceries. Or whatever.
Look, when we needed help — we never went official channels because we suck at bureaucracy and also because I HATE government handouts, as they’re a trap — various friends gave us baby clothes, or a bag of groceries, or such. And that got us on our feet again.
I don’t say any of this to be thought a good person. I’m not in fact a good person. But I aspire to be someone Heinlein would consider a human being. And he said to pay it forward, so I do. Including, yes, making covers for friends, protegees and total strangers. And also when I can (the last few years haven’t been great) dispensing mentoring. Because in my head that’s just what a decent, not terrible human being does. As is all of the above.
But then, you’ll ask, why don’t I want the government to take the burden? Surely I know that I can’t help everyone, or even hear about most of the needs.
I concede the later, particularly since some people are like us and you’ll only find when the noose is tightening around our necks if you’re our close friend or we are in such trouble we let it slip.
And yet, even conceding the fact we can’t help everyone (but we’re not the only people doing this) I oppose the welfare state and utterly reject it and all its empty promises and all its false glamour.
But Sarah, why?
Well, first because the “safety net” is immoral.
How is it immoral? Because it is theft. The government creates no wealth. The government has no money of its own. Any money being used for “a safety net” was taken from someone with threats of violence. And kindly, don’t tell me it’s not with threats of violence. Look up what happens if you refuse to pay your taxes, or even the part of your taxes that you can infer go to “safety net.”
It is immoral, it will always be immoral, to tax an elderly lady who worked and saved her entire life in order to give the money to a young person who can’t find a job. (And note I have spoken sympathetically of young people who can’t find jobs. It’s not their fault. But neither is it their right to be supported by others by the use of armed robbery.)
Second, because the so called “safety net” is mostly a cage.
Look, most of the people on Welfare who stay on Welfare have problems that can’t be solved by handing them money. That is not a safety net. That’s a safety prison, through the bars of which we regularly pass money. Even in the cases when the people on welfare didn’t bring about their own problems — being insane or handicapped is usually not something one brings on oneself, absent some of the crazier new age theories — what they need is what we can’t provide by handing them money: either psychiatric help or a concerted effort to find something they can do to support themselves or, for extreme cases, a way to live with dignity while being unable to provide for themselves.
There is no dignity in Welfare. It enables the state to poke its nose into your business, and also to make decisions for you. (And the end result of the welfare state is always the metaphorical gas chambers. ALWAYS. Look up what’s happening with assisted suicide in the “compassionate” states of the west. Because ultimately the way to help those who won’t otherwise be made whole is to kill them, which does solve the problem. Permanently.)
Third, because all government social spending ends up misapplied.
It starts as money for widows and orphans, but because widows and orphans are few in our present age, and the genuine widows find ways to provide for themselves, it ends up as paying people divorce and have multiple kids out of wedlock. It ends up being paying people not to see work. It ends up, in its ultimate international application as paying for trans operas for peruvians because someone sold it as resolving institutional problems or something.
The money, stolen at gun point from working people, creates such a massive fund (particularly in a country the size of a continent like ours) that it ends up attracting the kind of people who see it for what it is: a concentrated source of power. Those people, in turn, search out not those who can be helped and move on, but for those who will remain clients and give them that power. Which creates a need for the money they dispense, by regulation, by bureaucracy, by design, ultimately.
Fourth because anything administered by an institution as large as the government will change much too slowly and will perpetuate problems it’s trying to solve.
Even when trying not to, (and that is rare) the institutional solutions for the problems are the kind that perpetuate the problem. For instance, kids who can’t find a job will be told to apply and apply and apply, and capture the applications as proof they have done so. They might be put in training for conventional jobs, etc.
More good could be done in our day and age by providing them with a small stake to start their own small business, and having courses that teach them to do so.
But that is impossible because we’re in an area of catastrophic change and government regulations and understanding move very very slowly.
Even the best provisions to make Welfare useful and temporary are perfectly adapted to the early twentieth century and useless to us now.
Fifth because welfare in general and in the end will impoverish everyone is society.
When socialists spit-fleck their rants on making Elon pay for everyone in Africa, or in taking the money from all billionaires to feed “every hungry child in America” (A trick as there are almost no hungry children in America, barring those who are actively being trafficked and those on a diet. The surveys are nonsense.) they are, besides screaming at the top of their voices “I am an envious asshole who can’t stand the thought that people have more than I do” declaring their utter and complete lack of understanding of economics. (If their declaring Marx a genius economist wasn’t enough to tell you that.)
You see, they will also tell you “no one needs” x amount of money. And declare themselves capable of telling you what money people have in excess of needs.
(Sighs. Massages the bridge of her nose, to ward off a headache.)
G-d forgive me, but I’m about to invoke their satanic gospel against them. What they’re ignoring is “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Because of course, they think the government can see into those, and also that they’re competent to determine what each needs and can do.
And that’s the veriest, frothiest bullshit confection. They have visibility into exactly one set of abilities: their poor scrap of can-do. And into one set of needs: their own bottomless, gargantuan wish for more, more, more.
When they envision being “rich” or even someone like Elon their limited and blinkered imagination (No? Look at what Hollywood became as they ran off anyone even suspected of bad think) they imagine having money for everything they would like to buy and for the lifestyle they’d like to have. And above that they stutter.
I have yet to meet a single socialist who in their most secret of hearts doesn’t imagine “Millionaires and billionaires” as keeping their excess funds in a room or fortress. Whether they also imagine people swimming in the bills and coins like Uncle Scrooge is optional. (I suspect if they read comics as kids they do.)
What they don’t understand is that someone like Elon (and others, in a smaller way, but he’s such a glaring example) NEED that excess money. They need it to invest, to create new companies, to pay for research and innovation that will make all of us much richer.
If they can’t have that because they’re being taxed to their toenails, this impoverishes everyone.
Look, the very wealthy of the Victorian age contributed more to our world of extreme wealth and minimal true need than all the playwrights and novelists nattering on about the plight of the poor and downtrodden.
The reasons are too many to list, but some are for instance that people funding research into a process or idea that they want to use for their company or their ambitious undertaking tend to fund real science, not make believe.
Everyone with a brain should admit part of the problem in science right now is that the government pays for most of it, which means that they pay for the results they want. If you don’t see a problem with that, you might have other issues. What we need is for people who want to make more money by making better widgets or sending widgets to Mars. They don’t want faked results but real ones.
But also that people who know what to do and have the capacity for work can’t streamline processes, create better ways to increase crops (or lose less to pests) or ANYTHING ELSE if all their ‘excess money’ is being confiscated by government and mostly getting eaten by bureaucracy or misapplied to things that maybe might have helped someone in 1930.
And that’s where “their abilities” come in. I am — I flatter myself — a mildly decent futurist. I can see what’s coming down the pike when it’s written in letters of fire six feet high. Which makes me amazing compared to most “experts” and most governments.
So if I have that, why ain’t I rich?
Well, because the best I can do with my abilities is put it out here, on this blog or instapundit, and hope someone with more ability takes it on.
What I lack is not the intellectual ability (though I lack knowledge in some technical fields) but the risk tolerance. I couldn’t do what Elon does for half the time and twice the money. I’d be such a nervous wreck if I tried to start a company that I’d never start.
I also lack the capacity for work. I can work 20 hours a day for a while but I’m old and the body gives after a while. Some of the “millionaires and billionaires” are people who cheerfully work for 20 hours a day into their eighties. (Our president might be one of them.)
But what about the millionaires and billionaires that “simply” invest? Well, as Dan has taken control of our retirement funds and works at it, I can tell you that’s still an additional full time job, on top of his full time job. But beyond that, even if it’s “all” people do, because it’s their money and they’re interested in not losing it, they are more likely to invest it in things that grow and improve.
And the miracle of free trade is that what does well (absent governmental distortion, of course. BUT that’s not free trade) are things people want, things that improve their lives. Which in turn, by degrees, no matter how small, makes the world richer and better.
Still, given all that, you’ll ask what we’d do with all the genuinely needy. The halting, the lame, the congenitally incapable of striving for themselves shall always be with us. Beyond that, even those of us who are strivers and always on the go do at times hit a patch where we need help. And at any rate, all of us at some point will hit a place where we permanently need help. As I’m finding after making like I was twenty yesterday, your body changes and won’t let you go go go like the energizer bunny anymore.
I propose that we foster a culture of private charity. To be fair, this already exists and always has throughout the history of mankind. From people like us who help those within our reach, to people who are much, much better off and start schools or create programs, or HELP people we’d never event think of helping.
And there’s always churches as every major religion has a requirement for charity.
To let government usurp the rightful function of what is the basic requirement of being human is bizarre, and is made more so by the government’s war on religious charity (like the nuns who look after the dying in NYC or the Little Sisters of the Poor.)
You can’t say “But what if people don’t help?” Because people have helped throughout all of the centuries of mankind’s existence. Sure, often not lavish, but as we’ve established, from our perspective they were ALL POOR. And still doing what they COULD.
That is an a-historical piece of nonsense that is designed to incentivize armed theft administered by statists.
I can only conclude that socialists are either egregiously indoctrinated into a-historical nonsense, or judging everyone by the size of their minuscule souls and capacity for disinterested kindness.
I’ll leave it to their consciences to determine which.
According To Hoyt 