“Welfare needs to be illegal.”
“Why?”
“You know, ancient proverbial wisdomly truth. Give a man a fish, and he will be fed for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he will be fed for the rest of his life.”
“Ah, so you want to teach a man to-”
“Also no.“
I believe the argument is more “a man who learns to fish is fed for a lifetime, so the very least we can do is stop this program that, through the incentives it creates, is essentially paying people in fish to not learn how to fish”
like I don’t think you understand A: how much conservatives and/or libertarians think government intervention is more harmful than doing absolutely nothing at all and B: how much evidence they have for this position. if you think that Something Must Be Done and the worst thing to do is nothing at all, then of course they look heartless and wicked, but the Let’s Stop Making Things Actively Worse Movement rejects those premises so it’s unfair to cast them in such a way
I’m referring to a two-pronged approach of dismantling any kind of welfare system or safety net because giving people fish is inherently unvirtuous, combined with strong support for anti-intellectualism for plebs, an all-out assault against public fishing schools and fishing colleges, meaning taking away both fish and the opportunity to fish.
Now this problem leads to a sort of vague “eh now business is good and cool, fisheries will surely employ ten million fishermen” where naturally a fishery would rather hire as little fishermen as possible, especially as you just denied them the ability to learn how to fish.
“I’m referring to a two pronged approach of trying to dismantle a system that they think is actively making things worse, combined with attacking another governmental system that is well-known for wasting preposterous amounts of money to no productive end whatsoever and being astonishingly resilient against efforts to make it do useful things. There’s no way they could believe they had a good reason to attack such a system, I must have caught them out!”
I don’t think you get what they actually believe and I don’t think you get how much actual evidence they have for it, because it’s a lot. Most American government interventions actually are making things worse than doing nothing, actually, in real life in the world, and they will never ever go away and they will never ever get better because How Dare You Not Try To Do Something.
“…I don’t think you get how much actual evidence they have for it, because it’s a lot. Most American government interventions actually are making things worse than doing nothing…”
If this alleged actual evidence is presentable, I would very much like to see it.
To be clear: I am immensely suspicious of the claim here. The obvious first-order effect of giving resources to poor people is that the poor people, who are desperately resource-starved, get more resources and are thus happier. Certainly, whenever I’m personally able to perceive people being on the receiving end of a US governmental economic intervention (social security etc.), the effects that I see are almost unilaterally good. It’s conceivable that this is all actually swamped by second-order effects like “and then the free market magic gets screwed up” or “and then the poor people get rooted in a toxic Culture of Dependency” – but, when I see people arguing for that position, it’s usually a bunch of airy theorizing rooted in nothing. If they have Really Solid Empirics on their side, it hasn’t been shared with me, which seems odd. But if the facts are out there, I should be updating on them.