Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com> writes:
At 2:43 AM -0700 8/23/97, Adam Back wrote:
The real problem is that the pervasive bleeding heart socialist/communist welfare system mentality will ensure that you'll never manage it.
"The children" is a war cry which will ensure the continuance of state funded negative evolutionary pressures.
Don't always assume that these are negative evolutionary pressures. One of the hallmarks of Homo's evolutionary survival has been the ability to live in many niches. Welfare is one niche, and no one should be surprised when organisms decide to live in an available niche.
Welfare does indeed seem to be a thriving niche.
The question is, what happens when that niche goes away?
We get to see how well the welfare recipient adapts. Guess we get some real life evolutionary pressures :-) However, I think that western countries are rich enough that there's not really much danger of anyone starving to death. Most of the welfare recipients could find sufficient employment to feed themselves if they had no other choice.
For example, I have one friend who raised her two children (spaced 12 years apart) on welfare. They are now grown and she has a job as a Unix sysadmin. She obviously has the ability to move from niche to niche. (And doesn't subscribe to the Protestant work ethic.)
Yeah, I'm not trying to be insensitive. I know how to work systems just as well as any other. Clearly plenty of intelligent people can make a decision to work the welfare system to their financial advantage. My claim was that the average welfare recipient is less intelligent than the average non-welfare recipient. There will be plenty of counter examples, lazy people, people who have more interesting things to do than work, and are happy enough with the adequate lifestyle welfare brings. It does seem unfair however for those who could easily obtain work to live from the indirectly stolen assetts of those who are working for a living. Adam -- Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`