There’s only one question that every living human should ask...and that is, “How can I help?”
In America, a corrosive “entitlement culture” has woven the fiction that “there is some intrinsic value/worth in merely being alive.”
Nothing...NOTHING could be further from the truth.
An individual’s value is solely measured by what they produce.
How corrosive is our current, unsustainable entitlement culture? It’s almost perfectly inline with perhaps the most vile sentiments ever expressed by any human at any time, “We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions." (Adolf Hitler, May 1st, 1927)
There are no sentiments that are more repulsive to human decency, more barbaric in their intent than the ones Hitler enumerated above.
The West’s amorphous grid of dependency programs (WIC, SSI, Social Security, etc.) generate dependency at a staggering cost, both in terms of lost productivity, less overall prosperity and fewer people in the workforce – government jobs are net COSTS, NOT productive jobs that add to the nation’s productivity.
Yes, our maze of dependency programs means jobs to legions of otherwise marginally employable Americans, keeping them from doing OTHER work that we that desperately needs getting done – picking fruit, slaughterhouse work, as just a couple examples.
As an example of just how absurd this has gotten, Tom Coburn recently challenged the Social Security Administration to probe into how a 350-pound man (Stanley Thornton Jr), who claims to suffer from “adult infantilism” has managed to qualify for federal disability benefits, despite being both handy enough and resourceful enough to have crafted his own wooden high chair and playpen.
Mr. Thornton can drive a car, use a computer and do basic carpentry and yet welfare administrators treat him as though he were incurably disabled.
When the Washington Times reached out to Stanley for a response to Senator Coburn, he sent off this e-mail, "You wanna test how damn serious I am about leaving this world, screw with my check that pays for this apartment and food. Try it. See how serious I am...I have no problem killing myself. "
OK, where exactly is the downside in letting Mr. Thornton simply fade to black?
Seriously, he produces nothing, his entire existence is parasitic and his abuse of a system meant to help the blind and severely physically and mentally disabled, lends itself to copying by other parasitic elements.
There are tens of thousands of people on programs like SSI and others that are scamming the system, just as there are legions of former Civil Servants now collecting huge, often tax-exempt “disability pensions” for non-disabling conditions.
ALL of that is unsustainable.
Again, “How can I help,” is the ONLY legitimate question today.
Now able-bodied worker, no matter how tired of work or comfortable of wallet should seek a non-productive retirement, instead they should ask, “HOW CAN I HELP?!”
New York City has already begun what COULD BE a promising beginning by re-evaluating many of the “disability pension” claims in recent years.
Insurance companies can help by redoubling their efforts to root out scammers and law-suit abusers and by lobbying hard for much more severe sentences for such heinous fiscal crimes.
If an esteemed financial maven like Bernie Madoff can be put away for over 400 years for his fiscal crimes (a fair sentence in my view), then why can’t we put insurance fraudsters, welfare cheats and other disability scammers away for 25 years or more?
It CAN and SHOULD BE done and it would merely take the stroke of a pen!
One of the most exciting pledges made during the 2008 campaign was made by Michelle Obama when she said, “Barack will MAKE you work...”
Well, we’re WAITING!
Now no one expects barrack Obama to actually go to the homes of deadbeats and actually force them back to work...BUT he could hire those who could...and what’s more would.
People are living longer and healthier lives and NO ONE can be promised an easy retirement, especially when so much real work remains to be done. There’s no way we can sustain so many dependents in this much more austere age.
Yes, “promises have been made,” BUT, it's also widely said that promises are also “meant to be broken.”
How many auto workers have faced unwanted buy-outs instead of long-term pension and medical benefits. Unsustainable promises cannot be kept.
We can (and MUST) do this.