Scan Medical Insurance - "The Welfare State's Attack on the Family" Looking for more info to support these facts, links to more studies

"The Welfare State's Attack on the Family" Looking for more info to support these facts, links to more studies

The Welfare State's Attack on the Family Most people listening to libertarian ideas are thrown off by the thought that private charity, in absence of government programs, will handle problems involving truly helpless people. Charitable organizations are active but no one knows for sure how much donations would increase in a tax-free society. When a person becomes old without savings, what is he or she supposed to do without socialist programs such as Social Security? The forgotten institution of charity here is the family. When libertarians talk of charity, we don't just mean the Salvation Army, but taking care of your relatives as well. When my brother and I were babies, my grandparents stepped in to take care of us while my mother and father worked. My parents in turn provided for the whole household living under one roof to save money. When my father moved to the United States and made more money, he made sure that my grandparents would be taken care of. During the Balkan War, members of my family were forcefully removed and became refugees due to the conflict. When they lost everything, guess who took care of them? The whole family together sent money and whatever supplies that they could. So was the rule everywhere before the welfare state: your parents who took care of you financially as a child — you may need to help them in the future. This basic element of family life seems to be mind-boggling to supporters of the welfare state. Proponents of the welfare state constantly speak about our responsibility to society through redistributionist taxes. I have no responsibility to society as a whole, to some stranger I've never met. I personally feel that I do have a responsibility toward my immediate family. Programs like TANF ("Temporary Assistance for Needy Families"), Social Security, and unemployment insurance take away our responsibility to the family and place it in the hands of the state. They crowd out our sense of moral responsibility. Family was an integral way of caring for individuals as a whole for centuries. Supporters of the welfare state forget the past. Before the advent of Social Security, what happened to people who lived past 65 years? Did these people just starve to death from hunger by the tens of thousands? No. Did a huge wave of charitable organizations come to their rescue? Not always. So, how did they survive? Everyone can agree that there were no mass deaths of 65-year-old people recorded in the Great Depression before Social Security took effect. These people survived under a basic principle in life. You take care of your kids, and one day, they will take care of you. In the past, having children was an investment in your future. You knew that one day your children would take care of your needs as you took care of theirs. This created many incentives that produced a healthy family. For one thing, you had to be somewhat nicer to your children and make sure that you instilled good values. Children without a good work ethic or good values are not likely to perform well in the job market. A parent would have to teach these values to children to insure his or her own needs at a later time. Responsibility to the family ranked highly. Without this ingrained in a child, he or she might grow up one day and never return the nurturing given by parents early in life. With government attempting to smooth over every mistake in life, we get very different incentives. If your parents are entirely subsidized on welfare, how much do they really care about your future? Parents usually care for their children and want the best for them. But parents who know that they either raise their child right or don't eat in the future will try much times harder to make sure their child stays away from drugs, crime, and other bad decisions. The standard abortion excuses also play a major role in the issue. The welfare state has destroyed the culture of hard work and family. I cringe every time I hear someone talk about poverty as an excuse for abortion. I don't want to discuss here the rights and wrongs of abortion, but how can you make an excuse that you are too poor to have a child and you have to abort? During much harder economic times, families were having ten or twelve children. Huge families were not uncommon. Today, these abortionists want me to believe that with economic conditions a hundred times better than before, they can't afford to have a child. They're going to have to do better than that. It's not easy to have a child whether you are rich or poor. At any point in life a baby is difficult to raise and deal with. Even with a college degree, a young mother will have just as much difficulty as a teenager. These are facts of life. Raising children is hard work! The welfare state has reinforced the idea that if anything is hard, it must be wrong. Doing the right thing is not easy. Difficulty does not justify immoral actions. Sure, taking care of your elderly parents is harder on you than having the state do it. But is it your moral responsibility? Yes. It is not the responsibility of some other taxpayer who does not even know your parents. Anyone who would leave it to strangers to care for their elderly parents should be ashamed. Before the welfare state, there existed incentives to have children and insure your own future. Now, we have incentives to break the family apart. TANF actually gives more money to single moms. This may seem like a great program to help single mothers in need, but in reality, the program makes it easier for the man in the family to leave. It reduces the man's practical responsibility to stay and raise the child. The program creates more single mothers! And some day, it will be the government, not his offspring, who will provide for the man who left. This brings even fewer incentives to raise kids properly. Unemployment insurance has also undermined society. During the Great Depression, there were great movements of people to find jobs. If there was a job somewhere, people went. Now, with unemployment and welfare people stay in the same city watching everything around them rot and decay. Government housing keeps them complacent as they beg for yet more assistance. When times get tough, people will move to get jobs. The Great Depression has already proved this. Did millions die without welfare or unemployment insurance? No. Does it improve people's lives to subsidize their staying in one place? No. I can speak from experience. I've seen charity and love within my own family overcoming all obstacles in our times. Being born in former Yugoslavia, my family was accustomed to scarcity and socialist poverty. But I saw the family working together to achieve the greater ends of each member. This was not a socialist kind of responsibility. A family member cared for you at a point in time; later you cared for them. 6 My father's mother spent all her savings of thirty years to send my father to medical school. There was no government help there. When, years down the road, she had to retire because of breast cancer, guess who paid her bills and medical treatments. My aunt and uncle also assisted by living with her and taking care of her on a daily basis. There was no dependable national healthcare. There was no subsidized retirement home or social security. The children she gave birth to and raised responsibly made sure that she was well taken care off until her final days. Each was fulfilling his responsibility of a child to his mother. The agenda of the state is to break up the family. The more you depend on the state, the more you justify its existence, and the larger it grows. The idea that people can provide things for themselves either individually or through the family frightens the state. It delegitimizes its role. The role of the family is dangerous to its survival. Movement away from the welfare state is movement toward better family values and better family cohesiveness. The death of the family is the life of the state.

Public Comments

Vote republician
Thank you for this. It's the lack of morality in this country that is ruining the family unity. That being said, I agree with you. We should not be a welfare state.
I think that we do owe our fellow citizins who need help some kind of assistance. I do not feel that the government is a horrible way to help those who are hurting. Most people who support government programs are truely interested in helping the needy. They just don't see that the government is the least capable way of doing it. Power corrupts, and we only need to look at the hypocracy of so many government officials (yes on both sides) that shows how incapable they are of effective helping people. Government assistance should be a temporary benefit, not a way of life that it has become for so many. It has become a soul sucking parasite that destroys peoples willingness to achieve for themselves and their families.
I agree with you, most people is playing the welfare game looking for free money. That why there are less married people these days. People are living together and making babies so they can qualify as a single family and receive government health care and welfare. Stop the bums from taking hard working tax payers money by voting the sorry politician out of office that use these programs to buy votes.
My Father moved in with me in his last year's. He became a member of my household. At that time I took responsibility for his care. He had a stroke and became partially paralyzed a few year's before his death. During his last few year's he developed cancer. Still I cared for him in my own home, I never once considered a nursing home. It was Hard, it was work, and it was stress...but he deserved no less. The last 6 month's of his life I slept on the floor next to his bed so I could help him during the night, every morning I was afraid to open my eyes for fear he had passed away while I slept. I would not change how my family handled this for ANYTHING in the world, My siblings visited often and helped all they could. Anything not covered by insurance was divided and paid equally by all of us. My father died with his family around him, he died loved, and he died with dignity. Welfare can never replace this kind of family support and it never should. I understand there are a few truly needy people and those I have no problem with helping...it's the rest of them... BTW...My father served in 3 wars including WW ll, He deserved EVERYTHING I could give him and more, During those year's it was not about me, it was about my family and EVERY member of it including him. If libs could adopt this mentality then welfare would be almost obsolete.
Thanks to the republicans there is little or no family unit any more. Most of the minorities in this country still hold on to those beliefs and haven't become Americanized like white and black have been. It a sad state of moral decay in the US.
We have two strawman arguments here. One, nobody has suggested a 'welfare state', and two, nobody has suggested 'attacking the family'. Social Security serves an essential economic service....it places a dependable amount of cash at the bottom of the economic heap. All of this cash then rises through the economy creating consumption, profit, investment and taxes. S/S acts as a kind of flywheel on the economy...which is why it exists. S/S doesn't diminsh family responsibility, it does make it possible in many cases to assist family members in need. If you truely want to see what a country is like without any 'government interference' live in any of the dozens of 3rd world countries scattered aroound the globe. It ain't no picnic, brudda', be glad you live here!
You are so incredibly right! A family taking care of its own throughout the generations is the way it was and the way it SHOULD be still! One of the excuses I always here is that we're such a "mobile" country now, where people don't stay in one town forever because they "move to where the jobs are," and therefore aren't as connected with their families. Lame! We should bring our struggling or ailing family members home to live with us where they can be surrounded by the people they love. Yes, it's difficult, but where is the honor in putting grandma in a nursing home 3 states away? Where is the love and dignity? Thank you for your moving, thoughtful, insightful, and heart-warming post. I salute you! YouAsked: My hat's off to you too! Beautiful!
That is not a question! Way to take up space in the areana of ideas and give me 2 points for answering this!!!!
Last year my mother had a near-death situation. I flew down and stayed with her until she was able to get-along on her own again (with the help of her hubby of course). I believe that the socialist agenda would remake this nation into one where the citizens are completely dependent upon the government. This would curtail the four facets of humanity: body, mind, soul, and spirit. We are headed down this road, and have been for awhile. We are near the end-game, and will suffer if the socialist win.
hi check this link its good http://insurancess.notlong.com .
Look, you asked for more links etc. Here are a few, some good http://www.fff.org/freedom/0101g.asp http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/02/welfare-book-02.html some not so good http://www.apsoc.ox.ac.uk/Espanet/espanetconference/papers/ppr.1.SM.pdf http://www.issa.int/pdf/jeru98/keynotes/0-c-e.pdf There are plenty of links on Google if you look for “benefits of the welfare state”. This is the old fish story. I happen to agree with you. I think everyone should be responsible for themselves and their family. This will obviously shrink the size of government and cease its intrusions into our daily lives. Governments are meant to be in control. At least that is what everyone is taught. This may actually be true in every country EXCEPT America. In America we have a constitution which LIMITS the power of government. In America the constitution came first before the government ever existed. This isn’t true in any other country that I know of, not even current day Iraq. Unfortunately for us, our government is becoming like all the over governments in the world. They are infringing on our rights and taking more and more control of our lives. Like all other governments in the control business our government is growing by leaps and bounds. Can we blame them for that? I don’t think so, its what they are suppose to do if they want to survive and become wealthy…just like any other business So with is the real problem? The real problem is that governments are NOT supposed to grow. They are NOT supposed to be in control of our lives. They are NOT supposed to be our mommy. Yet we let it happen. WE do NOTHING about it. WE have become so apathetic that we just sit around and watch our Simpson’s and drink our beer and be happy as a pig in BLEEP BLEEP. All governments will grow to the size allowed by its citizens until the citizens can no longer take the pain inflicted by its size. This usually takes approx 300 years for regime change in most stable countries. We in America are approaching that time. I made the prediction, back in 99, that everything would hit the fan by 2012. We appear to still be on track. I am waiting for the elections in 2008 to be suspended and the amero to come into being. These will be the last two tell-tale signs that revolution is on the way. Unless a libertarian person gets into office and affects change peacefully, the violent death of the welfare state is soon to come. There will be plenty of sadden people over that as they will be forced to take care of themselves. OMG, they will need to be self-reliant – LOL – what a concept.
I am not so sure that breaking up families was the intent of the welfare system, although it is a result. AFDC did not fund intact families because it was thought that the public would not support giving money to able bodied men, so the men left. If you remove that restriction, families will not be broken up by TANF, especially if reception of benefits requires that both parents achieve literacy at the 10th grade level and then go on to either community college or technical training or apprenticeship. I would have the education provider, rather than a social services office, provide these benefits and would not rely on the public education system to provide the education. Rather, I would contract with the various parochial systems, the Catholic system comes to mind, to open remedial adult high schools. Other faiths can also get on the bandwagon, although they have less of a track record of private education. Even then, they would do better than the state. As far as unemployment and Social Security, there is something to be said for using families. However, you can't turn a pickle back into a cucumber. I think the best we can do, and what should have been done originally, is to set up a system where these taxes are diverted to direct employee ownership, with about 1/3 held back into general funds for the widow (possibly more, since life expectancies for widowed spouses are longer). These funds would not be paid down directly, but rather they would be used to purchase an annuity through the house of worship, or if none exists, through a licensed secular fund with strict limitations on commissions.