Today, the welfare state is the most powerful force working to lower the genetic level of the population. Any system that forces the responsible and hard working to support unlimited procreation by the incompetent can only drag down the average. In this little book [War and the Breed], David Starr Jordan reminds us that war is even more ruthlessly dysgenic. The very best of a nation’s men are cut down in battle, often before they have had even a single child.
Category: welfare
Being successful in America
If an American is to amount to anything he must rely upon himself, and not upon the State; he must take pride in his own work, instead of sitting idle to envy the luck of others. He must face life with resolute courage, win victory if he can, and accept defeat if he must, without seeking to place on his fellow man a responsibility which is not theirs.
Blacks don’t need these ‘favors’
Many successful political careers have been built on giving blacks ‘favors’ that look good on the surface but do lasting damage in the long run. One of these ‘favors’ was the welfare state. A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.
Destroying liberties
The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations, and benefits.
Political ‘compassion’
In U.S. politics, ‘compassion’ means giving money and privileges to well organized interest groups at everyone else’s expense.
State welfare: Cui bono?
It’s a mistake to think that poor people get the benefit from the welfare system. It’s a total fraud. Most welfare go to the rich of this country: the military-industrial complex, the bankers, the foreign dictators, it’s totally out of control. […] This idea that the government has services or goods that they can pass on is a complete farce. Governments have nothing. They can’t create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept.
Welfare for businesses
Government spending on business only aggravates the problem. Too many business have successfully lobbied for special favors and treatment by seeking mandates for their products, subsidies (in the form of cash payments from the government), and regulations and tariffs to keep more efficient competitors at bay. Crony capitalism is much easier than competing in an open market. But it erodes our overall standard of living and stifles entrepreneurs by rewarding the politically favored rather than those who provide what consumers want.
Victims of the war on poverty
The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.
The ‘gateway’ state
… I suggest that the more the state intervenes in such situations, the more ‘necessary’ (on this view) it becomes, because positive altruism and voluntary cooperative behavior atrophy in the presence of the state and grow in its absence. Thus, again, the state exacerbates the conditions which are supposed to make it necessary. We might say that the state is like an addictive drug: The more of it we have, the more we ‘need’ it and the more we come to ‘depend’ on it.
Unconstitutional appropriations
I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the general government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthens the bonds of a common brotherhood.