Have you noticed that something for nothing almost always curses the recipient?
A year or two after lottery winners strike it rich, many of them tell tales of woe as a result of their unearned wealth.
Families enjoying first-generation riches sometimes ruin their offspring by making too much available too easily. Pampered kids often find out to their sorrow that dollars we have done nothing to merit seldom bless us.
Could you find a better example of this principle than the past four decades of American welfare?
During the recent welfare reform debate, Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-NC) said, “The root cause of the tragedy of welfare is illegitimacy and the rise of out-of-wedlock births.”
He may be right. But it can also be demonstrated by
irrefutable statistics and by actual case studies that (to repeat the honorable
Senator’s redundancies) the root cause of illegitimacy and the rise of
out-of-wedlock babies is welfare. Unearned money doled out to
Compassionate Americans who set out decades ago to rid our nation of hunger and poverty and disease used their influence to set up huge programs to channel billions of taxpayer dollars to the needy among us. The result? Today the targeted populations are more needy. More miserable. More pathetic. More dependent.
The cure has become the cause of the disease. In far too many cases “welfare” has diminished the welfare of its recipients. Dollars donated to relieve poverty have made it possible for whole generations and even whole communities to indulge in behaviors that are certain to keep them poor and downtrodden.
Instead of rising from a hard or stingy heart, as some critics charge, the New Testament instruction that a person who refuses to work should not be fed turns out to be tough love designed to shield the indolent from the damage of doled dollars.
At least on this subject, Smith-Barney got it right. Wise men and women acquire their shekels “the old fashioned way.” They earn them.