Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:
The statement (about 2:00 minutes in)
The predictable response.
My thought:
One basic rule of economics is: if you subsidize something, you get more of it.
Liberals approve of targeted tax breaks for things they like: electric cars and solar panels. Liberals approve of government subsidies for things they like: sports stadia and college classes. Liberals support these public expenditures because they know that without public subsidies, people wouldn’t pay for the Volt or the Vikings. As a result, the companies that produce products nobody wants to buy voluntarily (General Motors or Solyndra) become dependent on government money and can’t survive without it.
Clearly, some expenditures of government money influence private behavior and create dependency.
Welfare gives out government money, but only to those who follow its rules. Does welfare influence people to change their private behavior to qualify? Some do, certainly. Do continued welfare payments influence people to continue to behave in ways that qualify – passing up jobs or sending the other parent out of the home? Again, some do, without doubt.
Do long-term continued welfare payments influence people to become dependent on welfare? There are plenty of social scientists who’d agree.
If welfare payments follow the same economic principles of behavior influence as any other subsidy, and if Democrats know this but insist on funding welfare anyway; then it’s fair to say Democrats support programs which foster dependency on government, that keep people trapped in narrow behavioral ruts, discourage freedom, initiative, self-sufficiency and independence.
Now, to point out this truth, are politicians required to speak in short, literal prose sentences? Are metaphor and simile prohibited in public discourse? Was Martin Luther King, Jr. really sleeping when he had his dream? Did Bobby Kennedy really ask why things never were – is there a tape of it?
If a politician were to say that Democrats treat welfare recipients as if they were pets to be fed and sheltered but never allowed to run free, is that really an act of vicious hate speech equating poor people with animals? Have we all forgotten the difference between literal speech and illustrative speech?
If I speak the Truth in vivid imagery, what’s the objection: that I used the imagery . . . or that I spoke the Truth?
Joe Doakes
Como Park
Only the right – that is, left – people are only supposed to tell the truth, and then only “the truth” that’s been approved by their various superiors.
Do I have to keep explaining this?
Years ago PJ O’Rourke made the analogy (in Parliament of Whore’s if memory serves) with regard to government dependency that we’ve made a habit of feeding the dog from the table and we should not be surprised when Rover tries to take our hand off when we present him an empty hand.
I’m certain the appropriately mortified left will call for a boycott of Rolling Stone or where ever it is that O’Rourke works now.
You should know Lefty, that O’Rourke was referring all of the people, groups and industries that have become dependent on government hand outs. Don’t know if that will temper your lilly-white hot hate on the issue, but I thought I would put that out there.
Getting more of something might be okay. The problem is that when you subsidize something, you get too much of it. Electric cars that have terrible performance, for example.
Or they just crap out, like the Fisker Karma that Consumer Reports was testing. The dealer had to flat bed it away.
Boss: That’s a Karma that couldn’t run over your dogma. The sad part of that story is this car was subsidized to the tune of a Billion US taxpayer dollars and was engineered and manufactured in FINLAND. Have we lost our minds?
The BS, GM has also bought partial ownership of Peugeot. So not only are we subsidising Finnish car Toimistos we are subsidising crappy French cars as well.
See this re GM’s buying spree: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2012/03/friday-afternoon-roundup-over-cliff-we.html