Poll: Welfare .. aka "The Dole"

[Wicked Pilot]

I pay taxes, and if I were to hit bad times I'd like a return on my previous investment. Of course, I would never purposefully stay in a situation where I depended on anyone but myself for income.

[Korvan]

Personally I'd like to see welfare turned into "workfare", where you are required to do basic jobs (like picking trash on the side of the roads). It would help some people get off their lazy a**, who sit at home all day drinking beer (or worse), courtesy of the Canadian welfare program.

Quite a number of years ago, Canada did have "workfare" in the form of (forced) labour camps. It resulted in a lot of seperated families and almost led to a major revolt when a bunch of folks hopped on trains to storm Ottawa. I believe it ended up with mass arrests.

The term social safety net is an apt one, as nets are very easy to get tangled up in.

[TrailerParkJawa]

I have collected UI ( unemployment insurance ) after getting laid off. Its $1330 / month for me. I see know problem with UI, it keeps lots of working people from burning up their savings or worse defaulting on their mortages or leases. I dont think twice about it, its a decent program as far as I am concerned.

I dont even know how you qualify for welfare, but chances are I would never take it because I have too many contacts that can get me work even if its for 10 bucks an hour or so. The hard part is finding a job that pays enough to meet the cost of living here. (Around $24/hour is required to rent a decent apt here and have some extra money. )

[LadyTevar]

The main reason why I posted this is because SirNitram is working at a job that's cut him down to about 15/hrs A MONTH... and he's too prideful to go get on foodstamps or welfare to help out.

[Darth Wong]

The main reason why I posted this is because SirNitram is working at a job that's cut him down to about 15/hrs A MONTH... and he's too prideful to go get on foodstamps or welfare to help out.

On the upside, he must have plenty of time to look for another job, although that may be of little benefit if the local job market is shit.

If someone needs money to buy groceries or pay the rent, then go on welfare. That's what it's for, after all. The fact that there are certain miscreants who abuse the system does not mean that anyone who uses it must think of himself as one of those miscreants.

By the way, my building contractor (who's a full-time schoolteacher; teachers are, after all, the only profession which has so much free time that they tend to have second incomes and opportunity to get involved in politics) told me of a child whose parents came in and complained because he asked all of the kids what they wanted to do for a living when they grew up. The parents were angry because the question effectively singled out the kid for planning to go on welfare, and they looked him right in the eye and said "the welfare system can provide for our son, and you do not have the right to attack his self-esteem by implying that welfare is inferior to any other source of income". These are the sort of welfare recipients who should be dragged out and shot. Those who use it in time of geniune need are OK.

[InnerBrat]

teachers are, after all, the only profession which has so much free time that they tend to have second incomes and opportunity to get involved in politics

Huh.

Let's see - my sister goes into work for 8, leaves at 6, then is up all night marking homework and plannign lessons. During the school holidays she's taking on a summer school job to make ends meeet, and marking yet more homework and drawing up more lesson plans.

And she's not even been given a form yet.

[Warspite]

teachers are, after all, the only profession which has so much free time that they tend to have second incomes and opportunity to get involved in politics

Huh.

Let's see - my sister goes into work for 8, leaves at 6, then is up all night marking homework and plannign lessons. During the school holidays she's taking on a summer school job to make ends meeet, and marking yet more homework and drawing up more lesson plans.

And she's not even been given a form yet.

Must be something they eat in Canada...

[The Duchess of Zeon]

(hey, Marina, tell us again about your brilliant idea for mass deporting all inner city poor people to the midwest as effectively indentured servants on the threat of starvation and homelessness?)

Fuck off, Gil--you're intentionally misrepresenting what I said on another board. It involved giving people plots of government land for free, the government supporting them while they were trained how to work their farms/land-sustenance based jobs for free, the government buying their state-of-the-art equipment to work said jobs for free, and all education related costs being covered by the government.

All they had to do was work on the land that was being made productive while it was being prepared for them, and studiously attend their re-training classes, as part of the programme. And if they didn't want to be a part of it--no problem, they didn't have to be, they just wouldn't be receiving a federal dolist check. No "starvation and homelessness" as we'd hardly be evicting people from homes, and if these people wanted some other job they'd still have state vocational programs to turn to!

Do you have some thing against me that you've followed me to threads here twice, now, and misrepresented me?

[Gil Hamilton]

Actually, this time was just using your hair brained scheme (which no you are misrepresenting by the way) as an example of how people who want to get rid of welfare have yet to come up with an alternative that doesn't make the situation worse. I wasn't following you anywhere, it was just the first such scheme that came to mind when I was thinking of half baked schemes that the people here would possibly know what I'm talking about.

By the way, which was the first time? I don't actually keep track of all my antics.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Actually, this time was just using your hair brained scheme (which no you are misrepresenting by the way)

Telling someone that they're misrepresenting something they invented is as good as it gets. Thank you, Gil. We can debate the effects it would actually have, or how successful it would be, but admit it. You intentionally made that statement to make me look like a fascist, when the goal of my proposal was PURELY to make people independent from the government, successful, and productive, while at the same time reducing government expenditure. Fuck off.

as an example of how people who want to get rid of welfare have yet to come up with an alternative that doesn't make the situation worse.

And that was proved by basically screaming "Marina wants to turn the inner city poor into forced labour!" Which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the ideal of making them the whole owners of their productive property would be? No fucking proof at all!

I wasn't following you anywhere, it was just the first such scheme that came to mind when I was thinking of half baked schemes that the people here would possibly know what I'm talking about.

Oh yes, one that was brought up on spacebattles and was never posted here. Yeah, right.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

By the way, which was the first time? I don't actually keep track of all my antics.

I don't either, since normally I like to think of you as a nice person and am forgiving and tolerant of you. It was in the politics forum, and I distinctly recall myself as being annoyed at it. I might furthermore warn you to cease this, as it has nothing to do with debating at all but instead consists entirely of baseless slurs against me which I will respond to very harshly.

[Gil Hamilton]

Telling someone that they're misrepresenting something they invented is as good as it gets. Thank you, Gil. We can debate the effects it would actually have, or how successful it would be, but admit it. You intentionally made that statement to make me look like a fascist, when the goal of my proposal was PURELY to make people independent from the government, successful, and productive, while at the same time reducing government expenditure. Fuck off.

Deception through omission is still deception, ole girl. I wrote my statement that way because it was telling it like it is. One of the premises of your scheme was that they'd have to accept being relocated out into a boondocks to work on a small time farm, because you very carefully described completely eliminating all other alternatives, other than becoming homeless and starving.
Thanks to the magic of the SB.com search engine, I can illustrate this the thread very easily:

SM, Gil: Attitude, I suspect, would be overwhelmed by the desire for food. Quite simply, yes, we would be stopping the dole - And here's the alternative.

Now this alone only implies that you are forcing the small time farming thing upon inner city poor folks, as it directly states that people are going to start to get hungry, if they don't accept your proposal. Of course, that's kind of iffy. Fortunately the exchange between you and Steltek confirmed the intentions of the scheme.

Steltek: "Okay, Marina, so essentially the government would be telling them "Work, accept this free land and be productive, or else you starve." ...and now that I think of it, I'm surprised to find that since this implies they're given the means to actually follow through with the former option, I can't really find any moral objections to that sort of government ultimatum. As the Bible says "For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat."

You: "*grins* I knew it was very elegant."

Confirmation! Not only did he spell out exactly what I'm talking about (and in his freakish way, approve of it), but you gleefully agreed with him! How exactly are they free to make a decision there? You are telling them they are free to do what they want, but they've only got one option besides homelessness and starvation, and you gleefully admitted to it. Where have I heard of places that give you any option you want, but only have one option to begin with?

And that was proved by basically screaming "Marina wants to turn the inner city poor into forced labour!" Which is the EXACT OPPOSITE of what the ideal of making them the whole owners of their productive property would be? No fucking proof at all!

The original thread itself is proof enough, and I've copy/pasted the relevant bits above. What do you call a group of people who are sent to the middle of the boondocks to work on small farms (which most of which are doomed to failure anyway) under the threat of losing their homes and having all support for them systematically removed? I'd call that forced labor!

Oh yes, one that was brought up on spacebattles and was never posted here. Yeah, right.

Sufficent people post on SB.com and SD.net to think that it was reasonable that someone would know what I was talking about. And besides, all the relevant bits of it have floated to the surface anyway.

[Gil Hamilton]

I don't either, since normally I like to think of you as a nice person and am forgiving and tolerant of you. It was in the politics forum, and I distinctly recall myself as being annoyed at it. I might furthermore warn you to cease this, as it has nothing to do with debating at all but instead consists entirely of baseless slurs against me which I will respond to very harshly.

Love lillies and lollipops then, but don't mistake someone busting your balls as a Devil's Advocate, like in the N&P thread involving that that court ruling making sodomy in Texas legal, as baseless slurs meant to annoy you. Someonely deliberately taking an oppositie position and arguing it to the hilt can only help you organize your thoughts and make you better able to argue.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

In America today we face a serious problem with a bloated government infrastructure, and a welfare system which, despite significant reform, remains a consumer of government money for questionable gain and even more questionable legality at the federal level. Orbiting this welfare system are such concepts as free healthcare, and in particular existing healthcare like Medicaid, which address perceived deficiencies in how the needs of the poor are being met by the efforts of those individuals on their own.

Furthermore, there is a serious and current national debate over the legitimacy of the Affirmative Action system and its affect on ethnic tension, performance in the workplace, general constitutional equality concerns, and the success of ethnic minorities in America. However, if one looks closer at the situation of ethnic minorities in America, one will find that the most destitute of them, and in turn the most destitute of their numbers, are members of the urban poor.

The inner cities of America have been abandoned. In some areas like Detroit or Philadelphia or New Orleans their condition is atrocious, and in New Orleans positively ludicrous - like traveling from America to a third world country, and one in a near state of anarchy, which is not to exagerrate by very much. These areas have populations predominantly of minorities and have the heaviest concentrations of those receiving government aide of some sort, along with the unemployed.

Though renewal projects have been successful in some cases, in others their success is mixed, or they have not even been attempted. Even then they are, at best, a bandage over the root cause of this sort of disorder. Why, for example, do whites tend to move to suburbia while the ethnic minorities of our nation stay in the inner cities? There are exceptions to this, of course. In cities like Atlanta, entire suburbs can be found with middle-class black families living a middle-class suburban life. Clearly, the problem is not intentional repression - for if it was, to allow any black individual to get ahead would be the fatal curse to a repressive system of providing an example to the rest - but rather one of poverty.

The poverty of blacks had been enforced prior to the civil rights era. I do not think anyone would presume to deny this. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, however, equality in law was reached, and the ruthless and cleaving razor of market economics demanded equality in fact within a generation or so. What, then, has delayed the attainment of parity in wealth between the black minority and white majority in the American State?

One must remember that the Great Society programs were implemented at virtually the exact time as the ethnic minorities of America received the final necessary protections to eradict rascist thought in the mainstream culture. With the time-delay inherent in minorities making their way up the corporate ladder and acquiring wealth, the vast majority of ethnic minorities in the U.S., and in particular blacks, were seen as destitute - At a time when the destitute were seen as needing the full aide and assistance of the government to survive, and perhaps to even prosper.

The result was that many members of ethnic minorities in America began receiving government support before they had an opportunity to advance anywhere on their own in a fully equal system. As they did, members of their communities came forward to lobby in the halls of Congress to increase the size of their support - as, of course, anyone reliant on an organization for money desires more from it, in the same way you might desire a larger paycheck, and there are always individuals willing to take advantage of this desire. Those individuals, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et all, are the second wave of the Civil Rights movement, though in truth represent civil rights in name only.

This locked the ethnic minorities of the cities into a cycle of poverty, enforced by the government paycheck. Their only way out of poverty would be to increase the welfare dole to a point where it was above the poverty level - But that is not something that would occur in the USA, nor should it. The enforced lethargy of that sort of lifestyle offers little hope for a future. The paymasters of the welfare system - the "leaders" of the "civil rights" movement - created an ideology of racism that would make Henry Ford and the writers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion wince. "Whitey" became a sinister plotter who secretly worked to undermine everything the average inner-city resident did.

There was no point in trying to work within the system because your efforts would be stopped by "Whitey" - So of course those people with real ambition turn to crime in the black sub-culture. Why shouldn't they? It's almost hard to blame them; anyone with natural ambition cannot ignore it, and yet they are told by their leaders of their communities (and sometimes in the schools in which they are educated) that the government of the country they live in is every bit as repressive as that of Iraq's was, albeit only against those who share their colour of skin. With that sort of hopelessness in the system, the alternative of working outside of it - criminal enterprise - is obvious for those who cannot stand the system.

So we can see that the principle problem that drives both welfare and affirmative action - and the associated programs in both cases - is that of poverty as an artifically enforced condition. The system itself enforces it. The offering of welfare is easy to take: Why work when it is available, after all? Many people would not, given the choice, even if it is meagre... And then, of course, the Lords of the Dole, people like Jackson and Sharpton, ever-ready to work to increase it and lobby for more money for their self-appointed constituency. These individuals perpetuate it by making these promises and securing the money that they can, and above all by spreading their ideology of hopelessness.

The system cannot simply be undone, however, even were the necessary votes to be gathered to abolish it. People without motivation and suspecting that the system would desire only to destroy them would be abrupt thrust out onto the street, the ultimate realization of their fears. Many would have no skills except for the very basic, and could not realistically hold skilled jobs without years of training. The artificial standard of the minimum wage would cause severe disruptions to the economy if they all received minimum-wage jobs. Even those with motivation and more trust of the system - regardless of ethnicity - would have serious hurdles facing them. The system is self-perpetuating in that regard, which is why Affirmative Action has been its corollary.

A solution to the problem remains even so, however. Principally, what needs to happen is that the cycle must be broken, and in an effectual way. The legitimacy of the government must be proven to those disaffected, a firm grounding must be provided for the poor in their new careers, and genuine financial stability provided. All of these things can be done, and will indeed require government largesse, but not of a perpetual nature.

The United States of America's Federal Government owns a massive amount of land within its borders. There are 641 million acres of Federally-owned land in the USA. The constitutionality of federal land acquisitions since the Louisiana Purchase have been questioned, albeit for different reasons. The constitutionality of ownership and administration of lands is certainly a matter for debate, if one long silent. Perhaps the best way to rectify that problem, however, would be eliminate it.

Much of this land could be made arable, either for grazing or for outright farming. In Israel, the desert blooms with the help of advanced farming technology which has allowed them to export 80% of their food, despite being packed in populace into a narrow coastal strip an American might almost think of as commuting distance. These sorts of technologies could turn a place like Nevada - where more than 70% of the land is owned by the Federal Government - into a veritable breadbasket.

There are between 7-14.4 million people who might fit into the categories defined as the extreme level of poverty in the USA. These people, then, would be the candidates for receiving land. Even at the highest level of application, 40 acres would be assured to each person (potentially 45, though some land would obviously be unusable for any productive purpose); with the figure being as great as 80 acres and likely to be around 65 acres. Considering that many of those in the range being considered are children, or the elderly, land would be consolidated into family groups (or perhaps if by the preference of individuals, into communal farming arrangements similiar to Israeli kibbutzim and the moshavim)and in some cases could reach quite sizeable figures.

Clearly the one problem here is economic viability. The small farm is very nearly dead in America. It is dead, however, because of the goverment subsidies that go to agro-corporations. These would have to be immediately terminated at the beginning of this project, and the collapse of the agro-corp industry endured. One might see a revitalization of those areas towards smaller farms, and in fact in some areas even more land - prime farm or grazing land - might become available to the project during its course as the agro-corporations collapse from the lack of government subsidies. This land could then also be purchased and used for the project as well.

The terms of the project will be very simple. Money from welfare, welfare-related support programs, affirmative action and related programs - All of this money will be diverted to the effort. Also to be diverted would be the money which had been previously delivered to the agro-corporations as subsidies. Finally, the budgets of the bureaus who's land would be used for the project would of course be directed to it as well.

Only the most recognized of national parks and sanctuaries would be saved - And they would be sold to the states they were in, if possible (and likely only if profitable), to raise further money for the project. Everything else would be utilized if it had any remote value to the people who would be inhabiting it.

Those people, too, would play a role in the building of their new homes and the creation of their new livlihoods. They would indeed receive government support during this period, but only if they signed up for the project, and if they agreed to devote a certain number of hours working on their homestead and making it liveable and profitable. During the period when it was being prepared, they would receive assistance from professionals, hired labourers operating as part of the project, and instruction from agricultural or other experts as appropriate, who could be brought in from foreign countries should their expertise be demanded.

When their homestead had been finished, and the appropriate equipment supplied, and was installed and functional, these people would then receive the title to their land, on an individual basis, and be set loose from government influence. They would have in the meantime been educated in how to function and handle the requirements of being small-farmers, they would own their land, complete and without debt or restrictions, and they would have had the experience of several years of labour behind them to prepare them for the experience of the agrarian life. In short, they would be fully suited to become the new and successful American yeomanry.

The program would be entirely voluntary, but government services would no longer be offered. People would have the choice of making do without them - going out on their own and finding a different sort of job and future than that being offered, or resorting to living off of charity, etc - or accepting the offer made in the program, and forging ahead with a new life, as owners of their own land.

Refusals by a certain percentage might further increase the size of the land grants to the others, but I think the choice would be clear and obvious to anyone, and the long-term benefit to a nation who's Federal government could divest itself of many wasteful expenditures, while at the same time creating a larger and more responsive agricultural sector, and giving an opportunity to rebuild our cities simply by seperating the poor from cities - and making them something other than the poor - and the cities from the poor, would be tremendous in all aspects.

This solution, if adopted, would ultimately be the one fix that might resolve both problems: Excessive government, and the basic morality of avoiding sending people on to the street who do not deserve it. Ironically the problem is solved by the removal of another portion of excessive government, but sometimes in life solutions which act upon two problems can be found.

(No, this wasn't academic, so don't expect any notes - I didn't quote anyone and all data referenced is readily available at a myriad of endless sources on the internet. Comments are, of course, expected.)



People within a certain category of income who live in urban areas but do not receive federal aide would also be eligible (as would be necessary when considering those defined the categories of poverty above), in addition to those already receive federal aide.

Minor addition on categories of eligibility.



[[Brackets: This is the original proposal, an informal one which I made on spacebattles in hope of garnering discussion on the idea, to which Gil has constantly made reference. Judge it yourself, please.]]

[The Duchess of Zeon]

< snip baseless distortions >

You're using a typical leftist tax-and-spend tactic of painting anyone who doesn't support keeping people who don't work on the dole, into some kind of fascist. And I'm calling you on it, and I posted the original proposal as proof. It might have some economic and technological considerations that must be worked through seriously, before either being proved, or disproved, but, as a principle concept, it is sound.

Your flaws are as follows:

1. You are attacking me on the presumption that government has a duty to keep people from starving to death. Nowhere is this duty laid out in the constitution.

2. Secondarily, you are attacking me on the idea I advocate letting people starve to death, when I do not. Even when government does NOT have this duty to keep them from starving to death, when I propose ending these UNCONSTITIONAL programs, I proposed, as above, doing so in a way which gives them an option other than doing so.

3. Finally, and most damning, you're ignoring the fact that only deadbeats, like the ones that Mike mentioned raise their children to make an actual career out of welfare, would be starving. People who didn't want to opt in to the plan, but who had real chances in life, could easily get up and do something else with it if they wanted to. They Are Not Being Forced Into Anything. There is just a presumption in my earlier writings that they would accept a final offering of lots of free stuff from the government.

4. Besides that, even the deadbeats could easily be motivated by the prospect of starvation, not only into the programme, but even into other things. So they do not have two options, death or the programme, but three. It all depends on their will, and their willingness to sweat a bit for their own income.

5. You are also ignoring the fact that, though states would be encouraged to support the programme, they would not have to, and large levels of state support would exist regardless. This makes your accusations even more groundless, as we're just talking about removing FEDERAL, and a few state opt-in, programs, at the most extreme.

6. And beyond that, this would considerably reduce the burden on private charity, allowing it to take up the slack.


So in conclusion, one can easily see that your representation of me above was a typical use of clipping of quotes to create a series of groundless, and baseless slander, the typical leftist welfare-lover's representation of anyone who wants to cut the dole as a fascist.

[Iceberg]

I've been trying to find a job for the last two friggin' months. It's not as easy as the "get a job, you welfare whore" conservatives make it sound, especially in a recession, and especially in a rather insular town with a poor hiring rate.

Money is more useful than food stamps - money pays the rent, food stamps don't.

[SirNitram]

I thought I better make an appearance, being the source of this. Yes, I am a prideful, foolish man. Thankfully, we haven't missed food on the table yet... And yes. The local economy is shit. WV is a state with no local industry; the damn Coal Mines it's famous for are owned by out of staters. (Am I turning West Virginian to be angered by this? Or is this a natural reaction to a bunch of assholes stripping a state of it's mountains and resources and not improving that states lot?)


Marina, your proposal is interesting, but runs into the problem of what would that many farms do? Economically speaking. Are we talking simply giving out parchels of land, or would the government be expected to set the new farmers up with equipment to start work? This type of thing, IIRC, was tried once before, but eventually fell apart. A primarily agro-economy may not be feasible at this time.


Of course, this is all probably hypocritical from me. I'd never work on a farm; I don't have the physical strength or stamina for it. At current, I suffer through my job, look for one that does not suck as much ass, and continue doing something probably incredibly stupid, running the numbers for convincing the company that makes thermal depolymerization plants to set up one outside the capital...

[Raoul Duke, Jr.]

I am a libertarian, and opposing such government programmes, the least I can do is avoid hypocrisy by not accepting them, regardless of circumstance.

I would like to see when you're counting every last penny, see that you can't make it until the end of the month, and meanwhile your kids need to be fed and clothed.
Yes, it is such an hypocrisy to accept help from the state to survive.

I think what she meant is that she doesn't like it, and wouldn't engage in hypocrisy by using a system she publically declares distasteful.

[Gil Hamilton]

I thought I better make an appearance, being the source of this. Yes, I am a prideful, foolish man. Thankfully, we haven't missed food on the table yet... And yes. The local economy is shit. WV is a state with no local industry; the damn Coal Mines it's famous for are owned by out of staters. (Am I turning West Virginian to be angered by this? Or is this a natural reaction to a bunch of assholes stripping a state of it's mountains and resources and not improving that states lot?)

Know how you feel, mate. It would be worse, all our industry was torn down and replaced with trendy minimalls, ten thousand school documentaries on the steel industry, and about as many out of work aging steel workers who have no money, education, or experience outside of the mill, but have families to feed.

[Joe]

*sigh* No tears for the decline of American steel, please. Both the unions and the corporations bitched and bitched and bitched for years, finally got Shrubby to pass those damned tariffs, and now the industry is suffering from excess fucking capacity.

[Darth Wong]

In America today we face a serious problem with a bloated government infrastructure, and a welfare system which, despite significant reform, remains a consumer of government money for questionable gain and even more questionable legality at the federal level. Orbiting this welfare system are such concepts as free healthcare, and in particular existing healthcare like Medicaid, which address perceived deficiencies in how the needs of the poor are being met by the efforts of those individuals on their own.

Translation: "I don't like the welfare system".

Furthermore, there is a serious and current national debate over the legitimacy of the Affirmative Action system and its affect on ethnic tension, performance in the workplace, general constitutional equality concerns, and the success of ethnic minorities in America. However, if one looks closer at the situation of ethnic minorities in America, one will find that the most destitute of them, and in turn the most destitute of their numbers, are members of the urban poor.

The inner cities of America have been abandoned. In some areas like Detroit or Philadelphia or New Orleans their condition is atrocious, and in New Orleans positively ludicrous - like traveling from America to a third world country, and one in a near state of anarchy, which is not to exagerrate by very much. These areas have populations predominantly of minorities and have the heaviest concentrations of those receiving government aide of some sort, along with the unemployed.

Though renewal projects have been successful in some cases, in others their success is mixed, or they have not even been attempted. Even then they are, at best, a bandage over the root cause of this sort of disorder. Why, for example, do whites tend to move to suburbia while the ethnic minorities of our nation stay in the inner cities? There are exceptions to this, of course. In cities like Atlanta, entire suburbs can be found with middle-class black families living a middle-class suburban life. Clearly, the problem is not intentional repression - for if it was, to allow any black individual to get ahead would be the fatal curse to a repressive system of providing an example to the rest - but rather one of poverty.

The poverty of blacks had been enforced prior to the civil rights era. I do not think anyone would presume to deny this. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, however, equality in law was reached, and the ruthless and cleaving razor of market economics demanded equality in fact within a generation or so. What, then, has delayed the attainment of parity in wealth between the black minority and white majority in the American State?

Translation: "race issues are not relevant to this thread but they're a pet peeve of mine, so I'm going to talk about them anyway, and in great detail".

One must remember that the Great Society programs were implemented at virtually the exact time as the ethnic minorities of America received the final necessary protections to eradict rascist thought in the mainstream culture.

FDR's government did what was "necessary" to "eradicate racist thought in the mainstream culture"? Hate to break it to you, but a half-century later, racist thought is still alive and well in the mainstream culture.

With the time-delay inherent in minorities making their way up the corporate ladder and acquiring wealth, the vast majority of ethnic minorities in the U.S., and in particular blacks, were seen as destitute - At a time when the destitute were seen as needing the full aide and assistance of the government to survive, and perhaps to even prosper.

The result was that many members of ethnic minorities in America began receiving government support before they had an opportunity to advance anywhere on their own in a fully equal system. As they did, members of their communities came forward to lobby in the halls of Congress to increase the size of their support - as, of course, anyone reliant on an organization for money desires more from it, in the same way you might desire a larger paycheck, and there are always individuals willing to take advantage of this desire. Those individuals, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et all, are the second wave of the Civil Rights movement, though in truth represent civil rights in name only.

This locked the ethnic minorities of the cities into a cycle of poverty, enforced by the government paycheck. Their only way out of poverty would be to increase the welfare dole to a point where it was above the poverty level - But that is not something that would occur in the USA, nor should it. The enforced lethargy of that sort of lifestyle offers little hope for a future. The paymasters of the welfare system - the "leaders" of the "civil rights" movement - created an ideology of racism that would make Henry Ford and the writers of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion wince. "Whitey" became a sinister plotter who secretly worked to undermine everything the average inner-city resident did.

There was no point in trying to work within the system because your efforts would be stopped by "Whitey" - So of course those people with real ambition turn to crime in the black sub-culture. Why shouldn't they? It's almost hard to blame them; anyone with natural ambition cannot ignore it, and yet they are told by their leaders of their communities (and sometimes in the schools in which they are educated) that the government of the country they live in is every bit as repressive as that of Iraq's was, albeit only against those who share their colour of skin. With that sort of hopelessness in the system, the alternative of working outside of it - criminal enterprise - is obvious for those who cannot stand the system.

Translation: "I'm doggedly sticking to my guns and pounding on this race issue, even though it takes some rather tenuous logic to argue that it's relevant to a discussion of the merits of welfare in general".

So we can see that the principle problem that drives both welfare and affirmative action - and the associated programs in both cases - is that of poverty as an artifically enforced condition.

Since welfare systems also exist in countries which lack America's racial hostility, you will have to do better than this to convince anyone that affirmative action and welfare are the same problem.

The system itself enforces it. The offering of welfare is easy to take: Why work when it is available, after all? Many people would not, given the choice, even if it is meagre... And then, of course, the Lords of the Dole, people like Jackson and Sharpton, ever-ready to work to increase it and lobby for more money for their self-appointed constituency. These individuals perpetuate it by making these promises and securing the money that they can, and above all by spreading their ideology of hopelessness.

There will always be lazy people. An easier solution is to simply back off on political correctness and let people show scorn for welfare. Let's face it; the people who don't want to be on welfare are already running on grievously wounded pride whenever they take a cheque so it won't make any difference, while the people who are happy on welfare could stand to have their pride knocked down a notch or two.

The system cannot simply be undone, however, even were the necessary votes to be gathered to abolish it. People without motivation and suspecting that the system would desire only to destroy them would be abrupt thrust out onto the street, the ultimate realization of their fears. Many would have no skills except for the very basic, and could not realistically hold skilled jobs without years of training. The artificial standard of the minimum wage would cause severe disruptions to the economy if they all received minimum-wage jobs. Even those with motivation and more trust of the system - regardless of ethnicity - would have serious hurdles facing them. The system is self-perpetuating in that regard, which is why Affirmative Action has been its corollary.

Easy to say. Hard to back up, since people who don't want to work have been a staple of civilization since long before public welfare systems existed. They used to simply turn straight to crime.

A solution to the problem remains even so, however. Principally, what needs to happen is that the cycle must be broken, and in an effectual way. The legitimacy of the government must be proven to those disaffected, a firm grounding must be provided for the poor in their new careers, and genuine financial stability provided. All of these things can be done, and will indeed require government largesse, but not of a perpetual nature.

You can't "solve" the problem of a miscreant subclass which does not want to work, because that problem is a direct result of human nature and variation. Any workaround to this problem will inevitably be "perpetual". Social programs are not one-time investments which re-engineer society and "fix" problems permanently, because that's a grossly unrealistic and rather naive goal. We only need to make welfare sufficiently good to keep people from starving or freezing, but surround it with enough difficulties and social stigmas that people can't get comfortable on it.

The United States of America's Federal Government owns a massive amount of land within its borders. There are 641 million acres of Federally-owned land in the USA. The constitutionality of federal land acquisitions since the Louisiana Purchase have been questioned, albeit for different reasons. The constitutionality of ownership and administration of lands is certainly a matter for debate, if one long silent. Perhaps the best way to rectify that problem, however, would be eliminate it.

Much of this land could be made arable, either for grazing or for outright farming. In Israel, the desert blooms with the help of advanced farming technology which has allowed them to export 80% of their food, despite being packed in populace into a narrow coastal strip an American might almost think of as commuting distance. These sorts of technologies could turn a place like Nevada - where more than 70% of the land is owned by the Federal Government - into a veritable breadbasket.

In a country which already makes much more food than it can possibly use, what's the point? And why do you believe that exporting welfare recipients to isolated farms will not be another perpetual band-aid solution? What's the exit strategy from the isolated farms? Most small farms are already glorified welfare cases, and you seem to be exchanging one perpetual problem for another. And how do you handle the economic impact of a massive ramp-up in food production despite static demand, which will inevitably cause a price collapse?

There are between 7-14.4 million people who might fit into the categories defined as the extreme level of poverty in the USA. These people, then, would be the candidates for receiving land. Even at the highest level of application, 40 acres would be assured to each person (potentially 45, though some land would obviously be unusable for any productive purpose); with the figure being as great as 80 acres and likely to be around 65 acres. Considering that many of those in the range being considered are children, or the elderly, land would be consolidated into family groups (or perhaps if by the preference of individuals, into communal farming arrangements similiar to Israeli kibbutzim and the moshavim)and in some cases could reach quite sizeable figures.

I'm still not seeing why America needs welfare farms. It would only depress prices and flood the market with food grown by people of questionable motivation, all of whom will inevitably need more welfare in the form of government family farm subsidies in future.

Clearly the one problem here is economic viability. The small farm is very nearly dead in America. It is dead, however, because of the goverment subsidies that go to agro-corporations.

Or perhaps it is dead because modern technology and economies of scale make small family farms unviable. My in-laws have a small family farm; I have some knowledge of this subject. They are propped up by farm subsidies and government controls because they are an inherently unprofitable operation. Modern farming techniques are equipment-heavy and seriously influenced by automation, neither of which favours small farms. The current state of farming methods encourages the growth of either corporate mega-farms or farm communes, in which the ridiculously expensive equipment is shared.

Do not subscribe to the quaint conservative notion of some Golden Age era where rustic hard-working people lived on the farm and lived some kind of idyllic egalitarian existence. Modern society has quite simply moved beyond that, and the clock cannot be turned back, any more than we can make Mom-n-Pop hardware stores rise up and destroy the big chains.

These would have to be immediately terminated at the beginning of this project, and the collapse of the agro-corp industry endured. One might see a revitalization of those areas towards smaller farms, and in fact in some areas even more land - prime farm or grazing land - might become available to the project during its course as the agro-corporations collapse from the lack of government subsidies. This land could then also be purchased and used for the project as well.

I have no idea why you believe the destruction of corporate farms and the reactionary regression to dispersed small-unit old-fashioned family farming operations will somehow improve anything.

The terms of the project will be very simple. Money from welfare, welfare-related support programs, affirmative action and related programs - All of this money will be diverted to the effort. Also to be diverted would be the money which had been previously delivered to the agro-corporations as subsidies. Finally, the budgets of the bureaus who's land would be used for the project would of course be directed to it as well.

A gigantic public-works program designed to replace large corporate farms with countless inefficient small-unit isolated family farms run by former welfare bums. I can't believe you seriously proposed this, Marina. Do you honestly believe the resulting patchwork of welfare farms will somehow be more efficient than the corporate farms they replace, or that they won't instead simply become a gigantic new welfare system which produces poor-quality food after massive upheaval? I don't see a net-positive anywhere in this scenario.

Only the most recognized of national parks and sanctuaries would be saved - And they would be sold to the states they were in, if possible (and likely only if profitable), to raise further money for the project. Everything else would be utilized if it had any remote value to the people who would be inhabiting it.

Sell off national parks to pay for the establishment of hordes of inefficient family farms run by welfare recipients? Did I just step into the Twilight Zone? Who killed Marina and replaced her with former President Jimmy Carter?

Those people, too, would play a role in the building of their new homes and the creation of their new livlihoods. They would indeed receive government support during this period, but only if they signed up for the project, and if they agreed to devote a certain number of hours working on their homestead and making it liveable and profitable. During the period when it was being prepared, they would receive assistance from professionals, hired labourers operating as part of the project, and instruction from agricultural or other experts as appropriate, who could be brought in from foreign countries should their expertise be demanded.

You know, every plan looks great when you simply predict its flawless success as a predestined fait accompli. Unfortunately, when you sober up from whatever you're using and try to realistically analyze the scenario for its likelihood of success, the picture becomes somewhat less rosy.

When their homestead had been finished, and the appropriate equipment supplied, and was installed and functional, these people would then receive the title to their land, on an individual basis, and be set loose from government influence. They would have in the meantime been educated in how to function and handle the requirements of being small-farmers, they would own their land, complete and without debt or restrictions, and they would have had the experience of several years of labour behind them to prepare them for the experience of the agrarian life. In short, they would be fully suited to become the new and successful American yeomanry.

This is not a solution to welfare; this is some kind of perverse fascination with resurrecting the "golden age" myth of an idyllic agrarian family lifestyle. You would shatter the American agricultural industry and sell off national parks in pursuit of this bizarre dream in which millions of welfare recipients go to work on mysteriously profitable small farms, thus discarding the concept of "economy of scale" in favour of some quaint notions of agrarian values and hard work (from welfare recipients; a rather dicey expectation if I ever heard one). And what is to be done with the welfare recipients who try this and fail, hmmm?

The program would be entirely voluntary, but government services would no longer be offered. People would have the choice of making do without them - going out on their own and finding a different sort of job and future than that being offered, or resorting to living off of charity, etc - or accepting the offer made in the program, and forging ahead with a new life, as owners of their own land.

Refusals by a certain percentage might further increase the size of the land grants to the others, but I think the choice would be clear and obvious to anyone, and the long-term benefit to a nation who's Federal government could divest itself of many wasteful expenditures, while at the same time creating a larger and more responsive agricultural sector, and giving an opportunity to rebuild our cities simply by seperating the poor from cities - and making them something other than the poor - and the cities from the poor, would be tremendous in all aspects.

Wouldn't it make more sense to spend the money necessary to fix the inner-city schools, so that the next generation doesn't feel so hopeless? If a community of underprivileged black kids goes to school in September and discovers shiny new computers, a well-stocked library, a properly maintained school building, and posters/ad campaigns asking them how proud their mothers would be to call their sons or daughters "doctor", might that not have some impact? Or should that be forever left as the unwanted solution, better left untried?

This solution, if adopted, would ultimately be the one fix that might resolve both problems: Excessive government, and the basic morality of avoiding sending people on to the street who do not deserve it. Ironically the problem is solved by the removal of another portion of excessive government, but sometimes in life solutions which act upon two problems can be found.

I see numerous problems with it:

1. Underlying presumption that small family farms are inherently more efficient than large corporate farms despite the economies of scale inherent in a technology-based modern farming method.
2. No way of handling the possibility (nay, probability) that many welfare farms will fail miserably.
3. No recognition of the possibility that this will simply create rural welfare ghettos rather than welfare ghettos in the big cities.
4. No justification for the economic upheaval imposed on society by the destruction of corporate agriculture; a cost which you simply deem acceptable without real evaluation.
5. Completely irrelevant, long-winded, off-topic diatribe about race which has nothing to do with the issue of welfare in general. Regardless of the merits of those comments, your proposal would make for much simpler reading if not for the unnecessary bulk created by this red-herring.
6. No recognition of the fact that it is more expensive per capita to provide civil services to isolated rural communities. The cost of building all the little schools and busing programs necessary to service this huge patchwork of welfare farms in the middle of nowhere would probably exceed the supposedly exorbitant cost of completely rebuilding all of America's decrepit inner-city schools, and that doesn't even include all of the other costs. The cost of setting up electrical power generation and distribution alone for this huge network would be staggering.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Mike, I want to thank you for responding to the proposal point-by-point. I want to note that I made it several months ago, and have never seriously considered it viable--and have since abandoned it as completely implausible. Your comments further reinforce it, though I would love to drag some economics experts and the like into seriously looking at it some day, anyway.

The genesis for it was in two things. Victor Davis Hanson, who you might know as a defender of American policy, is also a staunch agrarian, owning a small farm in California, and has written books on the subject. But he's probably biased on that subject. He's argued, at any rate, that the farm subsidies in the U.S. are slanted towards corporate farms, and destructive towards small farms (hastening the slide, at least). The second was in a reference in Sun-Tzu to an "agro-military policy," something in ancient China where the borders would be settled by colonists who would receive land in exchange for military service defending that particular sector of the border. The two came into my head about the same time I was mulling over welfare, and this was the result.

The intention was purely over the hope that perhaps there really was a way to eliminate welfare without forcing anyone into starvation, or some other horrific situation, that is, to see if you really could "have your cake and eat it too." As usual, such ideas turn out to be hopeless when looked at coldly--but I am extremely offended that someone would turn one of my more idealistic efforts into an accusation of fascism against me.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Translation: "I don't like the welfare system".

Well, no, and especially not the system currently existing in the U.S.

Translation: "race issues are not relevant to this thread but they're a pet peeve of mine, so I'm going to talk about them anyway, and in great detail".

The original thread on spacebattles where this was posted was actually about black poverty.

FDR's government did what was "necessary" to "eradicate racist thought in the mainstream culture"? Hate to break it to you, but a half-century later, racist thought is still alive and well in the mainstream culture.

"Great Society Programs" refers to the social programs of Lyndon Johnson, not FDR.

Translation: "I'm doggedly sticking to my guns and pounding on this race issue, even though it takes some rather tenuous logic to argue that it's relevant to a discussion of the merits of welfare in general".

See above.

Since welfare systems also exist in countries which lack America's racial hostility, you will have to do better than this to convince anyone that affirmative action and welfare are the same problem.

The proposed solution was designed for the American situation, and our unique excess of land, for that matter, and certainly would not apply to other countries.

There will always be lazy people. An easier solution is to simply back off on political correctness and let people show scorn for welfare. Let's face it; the people who don't want to be on welfare are already running on grievously wounded pride whenever they take a cheque so it won't make any difference, while the people who are happy on welfare could stand to have their pride knocked down a notch or two.

Societal change may indeed be the only thing that eliminates welfare in the long term; I obviously have no expectation of making a major impact in the current system, or even any impact at all.

Easy to say. Hard to back up, since people who don't want to work have been a staple of civilization since long before public welfare systems existed. They used to simply turn straight to crime.

Crime is work. It is just, in some cases, more efficient work. We need to present these people, I'm arguing, with a set of options in how to earn income, instead of simply giving it to them.

You can't "solve" the problem of a miscreant subclass which does not want to work, because that problem is a direct result of human nature and variation. Any workaround to this problem will inevitably be "perpetual". Social programs are not one-time investments which re-engineer society and "fix" problems permanently, because that's a grossly unrealistic and rather naive goal. We only need to make welfare sufficiently good to keep people from starving or freezing, but surround it with enough difficulties and social stigmas that people can't get comfortable on it.

My standing principle problem is with a federal welfare system, which should not exist. If social safety nets are deemed required in the individual states, that's ultimately up to the desires of those states for their implementation or not.

In a country which already makes much more food than it can possibly use, what's the point? And why do you believe that exporting welfare recipients to isolated farms will not be another perpetual band-aid solution? What's the exit strategy from the isolated farms? Most small farms are already glorified welfare cases, and you seem to be exchanging one perpetual problem for another. And how do you handle the economic impact of a massive ramp-up in food production despite static demand, which will inevitably cause a price collapse?

Export, and, of course, the reduction in food production when the subsidies to major corporate farms are halted (which has been argued would cause their collapse--but I've also heard that it would just make them consolidate even more, I grant).

I'm still not seeing why America needs welfare farms. It would only depress prices and flood the market with food grown by people of questionable motivation, all of whom will inevitably need more welfare in the form of government family farm subsidies in future.

I'm still trying to figure out, honestly, how much of our agricultural subsidies go to agri-corps over small farms here in the states, and thus the validity of certain claims that led to this suggestion. Certainly the point is valid, and may be the decisive one.

or farm communes, in which the ridiculously expensive equipment is shared.

Well, it would be ironic if I was advocating farming communes, wouldn't it? *wry grin*

I have no idea why you believe the destruction of corporate farms and the reactionary regression to dispersed small-unit old-fashioned family farming operations will somehow improve anything.

I simply wouldn't be suggesting the idea, if I had not heard it argued from some sources that small farms would still be viable were it not for subsidies to the agro-corporations. When I wrote this I had not yet confirmed or disproven this, and then I abandoned the subject before doing so.

Sell off national parks to pay for the establishment of hordes of inefficient family farms run by welfare recipients? Did I just step into the Twilight Zone? Who killed Marina and replaced her with former President Jimmy Carter?

Ouch. Okay, I probably deserved that.

You know, every plan looks great when you simply predict its flawless success as a predestined fait accompli. Unfortunately, when you sober up from whatever you're using and try to realistically analyze the scenario for its likelihood of success, the picture becomes somewhat less rosy.

Quite. However, let me emphasize:

This was written for another board some time ago, where the issue was actually black poverty, and thus the race factor was naturally considered quite important. The idea has since been abandoned by myself as being unfeasable; and I can see, rather impractical, though I'd still like to study the overall concept more just out of interest.

Essentially, I posted it here to show my intentions--they were genuine, unlike Gil's bizzare claims. I was fucking sick of him making out-of-context snip quotes, and so I just went and posted my original article on the subject so everyone could see for themselves what he was referring to.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

I'm on food stamps, and I fucking goddamn hate it. I hate the hypocrisy, but thats what happens when the fuckin job market's flat. Ah well, at least my roomy and my other friend found a job today.

[Stuart Mackey]

Mike, I want to thank you for responding to the proposal point-by-point. I want to note that I made it several months ago, and have never seriously considered it viable--and have since abandoned it as completely implausible. Your comments further reinforce it, though I would love to drag some economics experts and the like into seriously looking at it some day, anyway.

Just a point about your wee idea, given that I am a Kiwi.
Just about all of our farms are one family operations but are never the less muti-million doller bussiness. It takes a long time to become a effective farmer and a bussiness man/woman/person , at least a decade. NZ and Aussie would blow these wee farmers out of the water and they would be huge drain on the state.
You just cannot take a person off the street and expect him to beable to be a effective profitablefarmer in a three or four years. He or she would not {nessisarily}have the outlook for it, the stamina/fitness for it, or the inclination.
Actually your scheme sounds positivly stalinist in its approach