Friday, July 25, 2008
By the Way / Kotz / Media The Tennessee Jobs Coalition’s Fight to Protect Corporate Welfare
Posted by Pete Kotz on Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 4:09 PM
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"When you pay somebody, say, $8 an hour with no benefits, they don’t just merrily suffer in poverty. The government – and by extension, you – simply picks up what they can’t. Ask any emergency room worker about the legions of employed who arrive to be treated for ear infections, because they can’t afford to have their own doctors. Ask any social service worker about how many single working moms walk through the door, seeking food stamps and subsidized housing.
Their employers, quite simply, are just shifting the costs of their labor onto the state."
Nonsense.
It is the government that is shifting costs onto taxpayers by enacting those welfare programs in the first place. The employers didn't make the legislators create them. Ditto for government mandates on providing emergency room care for people whether they can pay or not.
The presumption that those things are "rights" that everyone is "entitled" to has no basis in the Constitution just as there is no ennumerated power contained in that document that ever authorized the government to create such things as the food stamp program to begin with.
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”
- James Madison
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True, Gilbert. Corporations and business trade associations are too busy advocating for their own welfare and protectionist perks to worry about others. (See VW, Nissan, pro sports stadium deals, off-shore tax shelters, tort reform, etc.)
But even most conservatives understand that if government doesn't provide the basic essentials of life -- food, shelter, medicine -- the people will decide to take them anyway, usually by gun. (See Latin America, African, parts of Asia.) If your daughter's sick and you can't afford medicine, you really think you're going to be placated by the words of James Madison?
Naah. You're gonna get yourself a gun and go get that medicine by any means necessary. Tis the nature of the species.
Spare me the creakly old liberal, "poverty is the root cause of crime" routine.
Just like every other liberal theory about anything, it's never been proven to be true.
In point of fact,the United States government DIDN'T provide any of those things for a significant portion of the nations history. Crime rates weren't any higher then than they are now.
the United States government DIDN'T provide any of those things for a significant portion of the nations history.
Yeah, and the average American's life expectancy was 49. You cannot make the world a better place by looking backward.
"What makes you think Gilbert is interested in making the world a better place?"
What makes you think you can prove that your concept of what a "better world" is is any better than mine?
The outcomes that would constitute a "better world" is a matter of opinion - not fact.
You have never accomplished anything in your life that proves you're any wiser than me in judging the value of outcomes.
It is an absolute physical impossibility that you ever could.
