When you give someone welfare handouts and food stamps, you help him or her until the cash soon runs out. But when you create conditions that enable such people to obtain employment and to work gainfully, you help them and their future generations for life, even as you imbue them with dignity. People who live off public assistance know in their hearts and souls that they are not keeping up their end of the social bargain. As long as they have any dignity, they are burdened with shame. They are told not to be ashamed: “These are ‘entitlements’! You are entitled!” But people with self-respect know better. People who work and who pay income taxes, however modest those income taxes be, take pride in knowing that they are part of society’s solutions, not its problems. To be sure, some people lack those abilities because of physical or psychological impairments that leave them unable to contribute, and conservatives commit to to their assistance. “For the poor shall never cease out of the land; therefore I command thee, saying, ‘Thou shalt surely open thy hand unto thy poor and needy brother, in thy land,’” says Deuteronomy 15:11. Indeed, it is part of the personal responsibility that a conservative bears to assist those truly unable to help themselves. On its face, socialism sounds so fair: To each according to his or her need — and why not? Equality of results. Equality of incomes. No homelessness. Medicare for all. Let us briefly look more closely. Guaranteed Equal Income and Taxing “The Rich” at 70 Percent When people who perform services and tasks are guaranteed a certain income level, with certainty that they will not be fired or reduced in pay, they devote less intensity to their work because they know they will not face consequences for mediocrity. If this phenomenon is problematic at the supermarket checkout counter, it is dire when it reaches air-traffic controllers, commercial-vehicle drivers, and even school teachers entrusted with training the minds of the yo...
No hoodwinking or hornswoggling here.
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