The Cato Institute has a new report out recommending building a wall around the welfare state rather than the entire country. As it turns out, the paper only recommends the old idea of making it harder for people not in this country legally to partake of the public largesse. Personally, I would advocate cutting back on all welfare in this country. This alone should create an economic pressure barrier, but it does nothing to help the millions who would go into business for themselves were it not for ridiculous legal and accounting barriers imposed by you-know-who. Please regard the following as only sleep-deprived, half-baked, semi-thoughts:
I know it sounds horrible, like I want to stigmatize poor children, but frankly, the people I know on welfare all enjoy standards of living higher than I ever did. I might care about their souls, but like Mitt Romney, I’m not concerned about their physical needs. It’s the poor old folks who subsist off a loaf of bread and one banana during the week, or a big bag of dog food for the month, that concern me. The only thing these folks get from the government is a notice saying their taxes are going up beyond their ability to maintain the old homestead. Then, there are all those poor, starving, diseased people in Sub-Saharan Africa, eking out a miserable, semi-subsistence on less than $1 US a day under oppressive kleptocrats.
Regardless, I bring this up because my twisted mind wondered, since the report was coming from Cato, notorious for its advocacy of free trade which I support; what the implications of putting a wall around the Nation State of American Welfare would be. Those receiving welfare would stagnate for lack of technological interchange. Would they languish or rebel against being dependents? Or would it be the programs and bureaucrats that stagnate for lack of ideas from recipients from other countries? Would they die from the blockade, or would they be seized by a little tyrant demanding outside aid that never gets to the people?
Stepping on even more toes, did I say I really don’t like American welfare? Granted, we all know people we wouldn’t mind seeing get assistance in one form or another from a government safety net, but at least in this one-horse town, they are the outliers. If you were to ask me what the Nation State of American Welfare produced, I might list current exports as laziness, human waste, spoiled brats, party animals, addicts, and other tragedies, many of which are spawned from despair and an acquired fear of creativity. These traits do not a sustainable community make. So the good people of the earth contribute money that is frittered on Fritos at best, because barriers for people on welfare to ever have enough to make saving or investing worthwhile are too high.
So, now, if I ask what should happen when we take down the trade barriers that already exist, isolating the people of the Nation State of American Welfare from America at large – certifications, registrations, taxes, permits, fees, and all that – and let people in the Nation State of American Welfare decide what they might produce to exchange for something to improve their own quality of life, I will probably be told I’m an ideologue. It is politically correct to view people on welfare as protoplasm that might soar to humanistic levels without a magnanimous dictator holding it down.
