Benefits should be a safety net not a lifestyle choice
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil Liberties
Commentary
EconomicsPolitics |
Samizdata quote of the day – Down with dole bludgersDecember 27th, 2025 |
 48 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Down with dole bludgersLeave a Reply |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Fair enough Annunziata Rees-Mogg – I will take a job that you offer me.
Presently I have several jobs – including looking after a shop (I was working on Christmas Eve, and was working today, and will be working tomorrow), however none of my jobs are PAID.
I should have specified that I will take a PAID job that Annuziata Rees-Mogg offers me – I will NOT accept yet another unpaid job.
I have quote enough unpaid jobs already.
As for the table of numbers the lady presents – it is outside my experience. Whether for benefits or earnings – the numbers all seem incredibly high.
I have never in my life earned more than 15 thousand Pounds a year.
I am 60 years of age – so I rather doubt that I will be find a job paying more than 15 thousand a year, if there are any paid jobs at all (which is unlikely).
What sort of job pays a 100 thousand Pounds a year? Doing what?
And what person on benefits gets anything like the amount of money the lady suggests?
I am NOT saying the lady is being dishonest – I just can not think of anyone in Kettering (a town of 70 thousand people) who gets anything like these numbers, either in pay or benefits.
Perhaps there are such people – but I do not know them.
On the other hand – the food banks are well used (there are lots of hungry people), and there are also homeless people.
These numbers seem unrealistically high, and the comments seem to note she may have overstated things. However, I do think that one way to improve things is with the name. In Britain they are called “benefits” in the US the even worse name is “entitlements”. We should call them charity because that is what they are.
And, ideally, we should set up a fund, perhaps managed by the government (god help us) where people can contribute some amount voluntarily, and the benefits pool is capped by whatever is in there. Maybe I prefer to send my charity money to orphans in Ukraine, or to educate girls in Africa, or to help support the local animal rescue shelter, or to support victims of natural disasters or famines. If you think the indigent and disabled deserve more than the current level of benefits, convince me and I might send more, or redirect my priorities. There is a certain amount of charity money available, surely the people who make the money should get to prioritize it? That way we can have a safety net based on voluntary contributions, and the contributors can feel good about their generosity rather than harangued and threatened by the tax authorities and the recipients can gain the extra benefit of appreciation of the kindness of strangers rather than rage at their supposedly ungenerous government entitlements.
I thought about this when everyone in America was getting their panties in a bunch when USAID was heavily curtailed. We were told that people were now going to die of AIDS in Africa. But, it struck me that there are hundreds of charities helping with AIDS in Africa, if you care so much donation is easy, online with a credit card, and tax deductible. And unlike government “charity” nearly all the money from these charities actually goes to the victims. Government “charity” is notorious for its gross misallocation of funds — in a sense it is often a miracle if even one cent gets to the people who actually need it.
An American version of the problem:
In Minnesota, we have approximately 100,000 Somalis. Some came as refugees, some were born here in the last 20 years.
As of today, 78% of them live completely on welfare benefits.
Our welfare system has failed in its essential purpose.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/graph-does-not-show-foreigners-get-more-social-housing-than-britons-2024-08-27/
A fact-checking article from Reuters which, while not denying that the latest census shows 72.4% of Somali households in the UK living in taxpayer funded social housing, comes to the predictable conclusion that this is no big deal.
While it isn’t a brilliant solution, I have for a while thought it might be better in some cases for there to be a pool of public works type jobs available for those on welfare who are struggling with getting a new job. Anecdotally I know some people who have been on UC for a while trying to get a new job but despite trying aren’t getting one and they say they’d prefer almost any type of job (within reason) rather than vegetate on welfare. The longer you’re out of work, the more likely employers pass people over for interviews, making things worse. Even if it is a relatively economically unproductive job it would at least get them working, picking up good work habits, building soft skills etc, reduce gaps in CVs and so on.
While there are plenty of scroungers and lazy so and sos on welfare, it is an awful labour market in Britain thanks to terrible government policies and AI wiping out many entry level positions, so I feel for those trying to get work but not currently succeeding.
@Frazer Orr at 8pm
OK, this is the Daily Mail so maybe take with a pinch of salt (or a shovelful if you are particularly cynical) but …
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15388599/better-benefits-labour-analysis-graphic.html
I knew of a married couple who “separated” and each claimed to be a single household, the man renting a single room bedsit, the woman, now a single parent bringing up two children all on her lonesome (sob, sob, brave and stunning etc.) staying in the Council provided home, claiming benefits, well in excess of the pre split income.
Once the bureaucratic dust had settled, the husband moved back into the family home and carried on as usual, both of them claiming housing benefit, various assistance etc.
Remember that tale when you hear of cruel and wicked benefit cuts that will have children starving and being sent down coal mines, up chimneys and in general, back to “the bad old days”.
@PhilB, yeah looks like the same info as the OP mentioned, but in the OP there were a number of comments calling into question the correctness of the calculations. As to people who commit fraud to boost their benefits as seems to be the case in the example you cited, I mean I think no mercy should be countenanced.
But, and maybe “topic adjacent” if not entirely on topic, something I have been thinking about a lot recently, since some of my kids are just entering the workforce, is what does the future look like? There are few people who know more about AI and its potentiality than Elon Musk and his view is that in a fairly short timeframe people will not need to work. People might work because they want to, but between AI and robotics it simply won’t be necessary to maintain a very high level of economic activity in the country. What he was describing, I think is something akin to the economic principles underlying the world of Star Trek (without the star ships anyway.)
Our whole economy is based on the idea that you have to work to provide for yourself, so what exactly does an economic system look like when that simply isn’t necessary? And if the robots and AI are generating all this economic activity, what does that mean in terms of how the benefits of it are distributed. Presumably, short of nationalization, all that economic activity will belong to the people who own the AIs and the robots. So, what does that society look like?
I think there is a lot of talk in this realm on AI but I think just as huge is the impact of anthropomorphic robots. Tesla and Boston Dynamics are the leaders in these markets and Tesla is really outstripping everyone else because, well because Elon. I think that these robots, probably Tesla robots are going to very soon be ubiquitous. It’ll be just as normal to have a robot in your house to cook and clean and tidy up, and do your gardening, and fix the roof as it is today perfectly normal to have Alexa or similar in your house (and that change took, what? Three years?) These robots will be a lot more expensive than Alexa, probably about the price of a small car, but you know it’ll be similar, buying them on tick. And of course every business will also have a whole army of robots, not just in manufacturing, but in office jobs too.
But I think something we need to understand is that this ubiquity of robots has another very dramatic consequence. I was listening recently to the guy who is head of self driving software division at Tesla (a very interesting guy, Andrej Karpathy, a Lex Freidman podcast, who is a really excellent interviewer for these kind of things. One thing he talked about is that massive advantage of having a lot of cars providing massive amounts of data to train the AI. For example, he talked about a situation they were having where the AI was having trouble distinguishing between a bicycle being ridden on the road and a bicycle attached to the back of a car on a bike rack. Obviously self driving AI has to deal with these very differently. But Karpathy said this phrase that I found quite chilling. He said they needed more data to train the AI so he “sent an instruction to the fleet to gather as many videos of this as possible.” These videos were sent back to Tesla which they used to train the AI. Just imagine that. He sent out an instruction to the fleet and every Tesla car went on the hunt for the data they needed. This gives Tesla a MASSIVE advantage in building AI, one that will just exponentiate.
Now consider the same situation with Tesla robots (which uses largely the same AI). These robots will be everywhere, in every house, and every business, and they will have the capability to send back insane amounts of data that Tesla needs to train their AIs. The privacy implications are terrifying, but putting them aside, the company that gets that “fleet” or robots out there will become utterly unstoppable. Their AI will quickly become so far better than everyone elses it is just terrifying.
I really want to buy a lot of TSLA but the price is insane right now. But, ignore my investment advice for sure, but I’m buying on the dip.
But my question is — what does that world really look like? What will the economy look like in ten years when I’m in my dotage but my kids are trying to make a life for themselves? I honestly wonder if it is the end of capitalism, since the very foundational principles on which capitalism is based are just washed away with these insane technologies. I totally know the “buggy whip” analogy. But the underling principle is that jobs move up the cognitive ladder — as machines do more manual labor people take on, more and more, the cerebral jobs. But what do we do when the machines take on cerebral jobs that are vastly beyond our capabilities? So it isn’t a buggy whip moment, it is the end of the superiority of the human mind, and that is a place we have no ability to predict.
And again, perhaps I haven’t said it today, but Musk is easily the most important human alive today. The fact that he is a good and decent guy is a huge relief to me.
Oh, BTW, to clarify my previous point and its relevance to this topic, it is this — it may well be that before too long we are ALL on “benefits”.
Musk did at one point call himself a socialist, albeit hardly a conventional one. Maybe that hasn’t really changed. I don’t think he’s any type of conservative, he’s got a utopist streak.
I’m not sure how Musk squares his views that AI will make working economically obsolete with his pro-natalist view. I mean he might just want lots of kids personally, but if there is no need for much labour by the population, would a country really then need or want a high population? I don’t know if anyone has asked him to explain this.
And here’s what terrifies me about Musk’s no-work-required world:
Who decides what level of benefit I get?
You just KNOW that it won’t be an objective “everyone gets the same basic benny” system. Will I be amongst the favored ones who will get the benefits that buy me steak, or the lower level that buys me oatmeal?
It will always be colored by the sympathies and predilections of whoever decides such things. With my luck, it will be a black Muslim lesbian who hates ex-lawyers.
And if my Tesla personal groomer Model PG-2 detects that I disparage Current Leader, will it report back?
This new society scares the crap out of me. Seems made just for the victim classes.
@bobbyb I think that perhaps the important point I was making is that it matters a lot who wins the race. If it is the CCP then we are screwed. If it is Google or Microsoft/OpenAI I think we are in trouble. But I think that the “fleet” advantage I talked about could well give Grok and Tesla a very significant advantage, and I find Musk philosophy a lot less scary than Altman or Xi’s. Based on what I have heard him say, Musk is basically a lite libertarian. He talks often about how we need much smaller government, and how the government should only do what only the government can do.
Of course a big worry is that if the government starts sticking its paws in things could go really bad. I think the next few elections in the US are really crucial, since the US is leading the race (though we should definitely be scared of China.) With all due respect, I think Britain and the EU simply don’t matter in this movement. Again, Musk is simply the most remarkable of engineers and so I think he will win the race, and if you get ahead you very soon get really far ahead.
But if the government is run by Newsom, or, God help us, your current governor, then I could easily see a movement toward nationalization, which is just terrifying in a George Orwell kind of a way. And, I might add, even absent the crazy politicians, I can see revolution in the street per the Peasant’s revolt or Luddites, and who knows where that goes. OR of course the government can always do their go to move of starting a war to distract the people and get rid of the population excess.
But I’d love to hear from other smart technical people here what they think about where this is all going, and in particular what does capitalism look like when the people are of such low value compared to the robots and AI they haven’t got much to do.
There are whole sectors that will not be affected so much, such as medicine and service industries in general, and certain areas of technology, and for your benefit, I suspect lawyers too. So maybe there will be a mass shift into that area. But the future seems quite opaque to me, and the tools I use to measure these things — free markets, free trade, people’s desire for goods and services, are all really messed up by these technologies. The old rules just won’t apply in the same way.
But I’m afraid Elon Musk really is the pivot point on all this history. I sure hope he is beefing up his security detail.
“As for the table of numbers the lady presents – it is outside my experience. Whether for benefits or earnings – the numbers all seem incredibly high.”
I can accredit that it is perfectly possible to live a very reasonable lifestyle on benefits, as I have personal knowledge of someone who did exactly that (he sadly died a few months ago) for many years, decades in fact. From the time I first knew him in the late 90s to the day he died in October this year he never worked a day. He was on disability benefits (mental health), had a house provided and all the other welfare payments and allowances that went with that. Despite spending a significant amount of money on drink, cigarettes (he once told me that by going over to vaping he had saved himself £140/week) and illegal drugs, he also had sufficient spare cash to run a car, and indeed often had savings, such that when one car broke down he just went out and bought another, for cash. He lived in a social milieu almost wholly comprised of people who lived exactly the same as he did, all of them not working, getting disability payments for one thing or another, free housing and all taking copious amounts of drugs (some dealt them too). There were no children (thankfully) involved in these cases, and rarely women, mostly just single men living on their own, each 100% supported by the State (or in other words all the idiots who go out to work every day and who pay taxes).
So I suspect that ARM’s figures are not by any means impossible, and that it is perfectly possible to ‘earn’ a living from welfare that outstrips median post tax earned incomes by some margin. You just have to know how to play the system, and be prepared to lie through your teeth to make it pay out. I also know of people who have suffered genuine hardship but have failed to get anything out of the system, because they are not prepared to lie about their circumstances. The system is utterly broken, it rewards the lazy and deceptive, and punishes the honest and hardworking.
I’m looking forward to my soma ration.
In reality, though, ain’t gonna happen. The human desire to better oneself is unstoppable. The strong will terrorise the weak, young women will monetize their fleeting pulchritude, the black market will rival the white and so on. That’s assuming the economy doesn’t collapse and the brownskins take over. Or maybe a war. It doesn’t take much. Remember how during the covid scam countries were stealing each other’s medical supplies? Very telling I thought.
” I have for a while thought it might be better in some cases for there to be a pool of public works type jobs available for those on welfare who are struggling with getting a new job. ”
Providing the job isn’t actually that hard, nor that expensive, given the welfare payments are often roughly the same as a minimum wage job. The hard bit is creating a system that says ‘Here’s a job, if you fu*ck this up you’ll get nothing else’.
Because thats whats needed, consequences for poor behaviour. At the moment there are no consequences for poor behaviour. In fact if your behaviour is so poor you either affect your own health, or can argue your bad behaviour is so egregious it constitutes some sort of ‘syndrome’ then in fact you will get more out of the system. An alcoholic will get disability payments, thus allowing him (or her) to continue being an alcoholic, just paid for by everyone else.
At the heart of any welfare system is what you do with people who blankly refuse to take responsibility for themselves. Do you give them free stuff anyway, or do you let them die in a ditch? If the former then you end up where we are today. If the latter, well no-one has gone there, yet. Maybe that day will come, and sooner than we think, if the UK continues its current downward trajectory.
As I spend most of my time nowadays as a volunteer my experience backs up Jim’s observations but with one huge caveat. Women, mostly pre-middle age, have perfected the lifestyle he describes. The plethora of high street nail bars and tanning parlours may be illegal but unlike their Turkish barber counterparts the shops are generally packed. The women are rarely childless. I often look on in near disbelief at their new and expensive cars, far better than my own after a lifetimes hard work, which I help load up with bags from the foodbank.
I did a quick calculation to see what Universal Credit I could get if I were to return to my home town in the UK and claim (dishonestly) to have no savings or assets. The answer is £1023.14 a month. Not great but add in the odd day’s cash in hand work and one could bumble on. It’s hardly the life of Riley though, what with the cost of living in Britain.
@Paul Marks, £15k a year is very low earnings, less than half the UK median. Around 1.3m people earn more than £100k. Full time employment at minimum wage should generate just over £22k pa.
To a point I don’t wholly fault these women. There’s a literature about the female happiness paradox where while women are more successful in the workplace and objectively better off than ever, their reported happiness and mental health has tumbled. Feminism sold them a false dream. While welfare dependency shouldn’t be condoned, I can see why some girls may drop out and raise kids on welfare rather than follow the illusions feminists have been selling them. Given the poor fertility rate we have, the fact that they’re having kids shouldn’t be sneered at.
“While welfare dependency shouldn’t be condoned, I can see why some girls may drop out and raise kids on welfare rather than follow the illusions feminists have been selling them. Given the poor fertility rate we have, the fact that they’re having kids shouldn’t be sneered at.”
One doubts whether potential CEOs, surgeons, scientists and AI experts will be flowing out of council estates in their droves in 18 years time tho……
It is a very weird idea to think that people on benefits are getting tens of thousands of Pounds a year – if that is so why are there so many desperate people at the Food Banks?
However, the people who administer the system and run the endless “education and training” schemes may well be getting tens of thousands of Pounds a year. And there are vast numbers of such people.
Perhaps the lady should direct her attention to them.
Marius – I do not believe I have ever 22 thousand Pounds a year, and I assure you I am not an unusual case. Indeed I was doing well (till May 2025) compared to a lot of people I know. I was on less than 15 thousand a year before I was elected to North Northants Unitary Authority in May 2021.
I was made redundant from Wicksteed Park by the Covid lockdown in 2020 – I did not get benefits, but I did get pay from another job I had at the time.
Sometimes I have had more than one paid job at a time – but I doubt the total (combined) figure was ever anything like what you say is the minimum. Although inflation may have changed things – after all it is a long time ago (decades ago now) when I was working 60 hour weeks (sometimes a 100 hours a week) as a security guard.
I also do not see how you could get a thousand Pounds a month on Universal Credit – a friend of mine (only a few hundred yards away) was on Universal Credit and he did not get a thousand Pounds a month – but perhaps he just did not understand the system (the system is just about impossible to understand – unless someone is a specialist on the subject). He now gets up at 4AM to deliver newspapers in a van, his health is not good – and he is very tired all the time, I fear he will have a road traffic accident.
bobby b – as you know, these people should never have been allowed into the United States, and they should be deported.
Including, especially, those among them who have become Members of Congress.
I just checked with the person I mentioned – he was on 74 Pounds a week “Universal Credit”.
That is no where near a thousand Pounds a month.
I believe that “Job Seekers Allowance” is less than 74 Pounds a week – but I have not checked.
The figures of tens of thousands of Pounds a year may be TRUE – but only for people those few people who know how to work the system.
Of course, the people who administer the system, or the “education and training” schemes are on tens of thousands of Pounds a year.
@bobby b
And if my Tesla personal groomer Model PG-2 detects that I disparage Current Leader, will it report back?
Right now hundreds of millions of people have many microphones in their homes in their Alexa and so forth systems. So I guess that already has potential to happen. I have heard also that the spooks snoop on just regular people’s cell phone mics. I’m dubious about this claim, certainly not widespread, but who knows with these people.
I have heard many stories about people chatting in their home about some product they were thinking of with their Alexa passively sitting there, and all of a sudden that very same product starts appearing in all their advertising feeds.
I’m reminded of this cartoon.
If houses were a reasonable price for people to live and raise families, this country would be a better place. The change to allow both wages of a couple to count towards a mortgage did us no good at all. policies in this country have always been corporatist. Energy currently being a case in point.
I was thinking of this the other day. Proud to have resisted the pull of the Alexa, retaining my privacy . . . .
Then, of course, realized that I merely need say “Hey, Google”, and my phone lights up and becomes Alexa.
There is no shelter.
I mentioned this idea in a previous post- Jury dole. Why not have people seeking the dole eligible for Jury service? I once had to serve on a jury, and it took 4 weeks of my work time away from me. Unemployed people would have no such trouble. In fact, they should be the only source of jurors.
The numbers (the statistics) do not correspond with what people get in real life.
That is a serious problem.
If a political argument depends on saying “you get X amount of money” and people know they do NOT get that amount of money – the political argument falls apart.
The purpose of the “education and training” schemes seems to be to employ the people running the schemes – not to get people on the schemes into jobs (what jobs?) – so that is all rather ethically divergent.
As for a euthanasia scheme – whilst some people would voluntarily sign up, it would mean a radical rejection of traditional moral principles.
I’ve been in two minds about commenting on this post. But here goes.
Long-time inmates will have seen me occasionally mention my brother and sister-in-law, who live in a medium-sized town in the UK, and are candidates for sainthood. For more than 30 years, in addition to raising their own two children, they have tirelessly, continuously fostered a whole legion of other children. Many of these came from dire situations, all were desperately challenged in one way or another. As if that was not enough, they also volunteered for a variety of other care roles, being designated Appropriate Adults, teaching and training, and much more besides.
A year or two ago, they aged-out of the foster-care system – adjudged too old to foster teenagers. So they sat back and took stock. And realized how, despite all their efforts, a grand total of One (1) of all those children have gone on to successful, productive lives. One. He’s now a police officer in a rural county. Two are dead, both drug-related. Two are in/have been in prison. The longest foster they ever had, who took advantage of every preferntial benefit to get an excellent education and a place at a highly-selective training school that virtually-guaranteed a successful and lucrative career, is now a single mother of three, by three different fathers, living on benefits since none of them contribute a penny but provide endless conflict and drama. Several more are simply in-the-wind – gone, who knows where, doing, who-knows what.
And it wasn’t anything they did – their own two kids, brought up side-by-side with the fosters and with no distinctions, both went on to postgraduate degrees, marriage and children. One’s a university biochemist, the other is a head teacher.
And they finally agreed that it wasn’t them, or anything they did, that led to all this failure, but rather, the ‘benefits’ and ‘social care’ systems, which seem to exist to create and encourage failure and dependence. The minute these kids turned 18, all those examples of successful behaviours and good choices were gone like a fart in the wind in the face of a whole system promising nothing but free shit for no effort. Free housing, free money, free food, free “support” of 100 different kinds, but none of it directed at making their lives better or more successful, all of it assiduously directed at removing any consequences from their poor decisions, and actively encouraging them to make more.
It’s actually become a mental burden to my brother and SIL, thinking that all their decades of selfless and unrewarded effort were effectively pissed away by the very systems that were supposed to be supporting them, and all of those young lives they tried so hard to improve were simply tossed away.
Shit, I’m 5,000 miles away, and even I’m depressed by it.
llater,
llamas
“Why not have people seeking the dole eligible for Jury service? ”
Bad idea. Really really bad idea. Do you fancy being judged by a bunch of drink and drug addled types who haven’t done an ounce of work in decades if ever? Apart from which, they’d never show up, or show up off their t*ts.
When my welfare claiming friend who I mentioned above died I was the executor of his will. I had to pass on some of his personal effects to an acquaintance of his, as directed by his will. I knocked on this guys door one day around noon, and when he finally opened I was assailed by wall of dope smoke. It was like smog in there. The dog he had with him must have been stoned. He cheerfully informed me that I was lucky to have found him up, mostly he’s in bed till well into the afternoon, ‘out of it’ as he put it. He looked rather like Gollum, all skin and bone, sunken eyes and paranoia, looking at me like I was an alien being, which I indeed was, what with me being a responsible working taxpayer. He of course lives entirely at the expense of people like me, and deals drugs on the side (he was my friends drug dealer).
Is that the class of people you want to draw all juries from?
@llamas: you sum it up beautifully. I know someone who has done likewise and people like them and your relatives are the closest thing I can think of to what a saint would be. And all that effort is for naught because the system actively destroys all their efforts.
Western societies have tried empathy and kindness for too long, and I think we have conclusively proved it doesn’t work, and indeed is actually malevolent in the long run.
The time is rapidly approaching when we will have to try the alternative approach of self discipline, responsibility and suffering the consequences of your own actions. Not least because we won’t be able to afford anything else.
@Paul Marks – just to follow up… The numbers I quoted for people earning £100 or more, median salary and full time earnings at minimum wage are as of 2025.
The Universal Credit figure I got from putting my details into entitledto.co.uk which is one of several benefits estimating sites approved by the government.
I appreciate this is only an estimate but UC must be OK because we have more than 8 million claiming it, plus another 4 million on the sick. If your mate is only getting £74 a week he must have housing covered separately.
@llamas your brother and SIL do indeed sound like saints. I have a friend that is similar, who has fostered perhaps a dozen kids along with her own. She is a high school science teacher and I remember her telling me she had a junior (so about 16) whose family situation had fallen apart and he was going into “the system” and she said she brought him home and parented him for the next couple of years until he went on to be a productive person. The thing I found shocking was the way she said it: I brought him home to live with us, almost like she was picking up a carton of milk for breakfast.
Some people are just better people than the rest of us, and she was a way better person than me. Sounds like you have a couple in your family too.
But often when these kids get to their foster parents they are already very, very broken. The government can’t keep the potholes filled in on the roads, imagine how bad they are at something difficult like parenting. And I have dealt with children’s services before, and although there are some good intentioned people working in there they are mostly people ground down by the system or ideological zealots who shouldn’t be in charge of a pet hamster never mind a child. It is, for example, common in the area where I live for kids taken from their parents to be subject to a diversity quota — so that same number of black kids taken from the dreadful situations they live in to be balanced with a proportionate number of white kids. You can imagine how that goes.
Of course some kids find themselves in dreadfully abusive situations so we do need some mechanism for bringing these kids relief, but throwing them in the government system is truly out of the frying pan, into the fire.
So, although I don’t doubt your thesis that the welfare system enabling their mistakes lead them to a bad place, I think it is also fair to say that their journey to your brother’s home left scars that are very hard to heal.
So I’d say to your family that they should celebrate the one they saved rather than beating themselves up for the ones they couldn’t.
But one question — people surely need to suffer the consequences of their actions. A while ago I was talking the the head teacher of my kids’ school about grades and finding the balance between grades as a feedback to the kid and the risk it poses if the teacher is unfair to their future opportunities. The analogy I used I think applies here: if a kid is learning to ride a bike, for sure, let then fall and skin their knee, or crash into a tree. Those small consequences will help them learn. However, you don’t take them, put them on a bike in the middle of a busy road and let them fail there. The consequences are too severe.
So, I’m curious — what do you think the right thing to do here is? Those people who through circumstances, through years of unresolved damage, through terrible choices or just through plain laziness can’t provide for themselves: what is to be done with them? Surely there needs to be some consequence but are we to let them die in the street? And what of the second order consequences — when that mom of three can’t provide for the three kiddos, are the kids to suffer shocking poverty because of their mom’s terrible choices?
FWIW, I think the answer is the privatization of charity. Where individuals can be dealt with as individuals and we can consider it on a case by case basis. The elimination of the notion of “entitlements” where the name itself is part of the problem. No, not “entitlements”, not “benefits” not “welfare” but, what it is: charity.
But of course that denies the reality of what is really going on: in many cases welfare is a bribe to buy people’s vote. So, as usual, it is deeply corrupted by politics.
Oh, and BTW someone might object that we should not treat welfare recipients as we do children. But I’ll say here what I tell my kids — you are not an adult when you reach a certain age, you are an adult when you are paying your own bills and supporting yourself.
I used to have clients who were convinced that they could explain their (illegal) actions in a way that would convince reasonable and intelligent people that they were in the right.
I would tell them that they were going to be judged by people who couldn’t get out of jury duty.
They would wince, and then go along with my recommendations.
It’s already a low bar. Limiting jurors even further, to those who couldn’t make a living wiping tables and pouring coffee, wouldn’t make it a better system.
I suppose that I object to people being conscripted for jury duty, like I was. This would be a libertarian approach. Another would be to have professional jurors who are assigned to a case because of some expertise- like psychologists in cases involving claims of insanity. And I still think that Jury-dole has some benefit.
Fraser Orr and bobby b, talking about devices listening to them, I think the following is obvious, but the current collection of such data is probably the MAIN reason the government wants AI so badly. It’s the only hope they have of sifting through a billion conversations a day to find the nuggets they are interested in. The surveillance state can’t be cut enough…and I don’t see that Trump is even trying.
Marius – I am not calling you a liar.
I am simply pointing out that I know many people on benefits – and none of them get anything like this amount of money.
74 Pounds a week is actually rather high – there are quite a few people on less than that.
What people supposedly could get has no relation (none) to what most people get in real life.
There are savings that could be made – for example the pointless “education and training” schemes, which are largely there to employ the people who run them. They are not there to “get people into jobs” – what jobs? There are also a vast number of well paid people administering the benefits and services – far more than are needed.
Yes a euthanasia scheme for people on benefits would also save money – that would be rejecting mainstream moral principles, even though some people would certainly sign up voluntarily.
As for getting rid of Trade Union power and also the endless “licensing” and other regulations that prevent people even being nightwatchmen now, sadly there is no chance of such policies – perhaps because (yes – because) they would drastically reduce the number of people on benefits.
The powers-that-be do not want to reduce the number of people on benefits – quite the contrary.
There is no chance of radical deregulation (the end of “licensing” and other demands for “credentials” – paper qualifications that in now way reflect ability to do a job), and there is no chance of an end to the powers that governments have given to unions.
Indeed both regulations and union power are being INCREASED – which the government knows (knows very well) will increase the number of people on benefits.
Who will be put into (utterly useless – and rather expensive) “education and training” schemes – that do not lead anywhere.
“I am simply pointing out that I know many people on benefits – and none of them get anything like this amount of money. 74 Pounds a week is actually rather high – there are quite a few people on less than that.”
As I pointed out above, the system is quite parsimonious for those who tell the truth, its quite generous for those prepared to dissemble. If your friend was prepared to expend a bit of time visiting his doctor complaining of anxiety or depression (something that cannot be gainsaid), get prescribed some happy pills (which every doctor will do just to get rid of you) and then make an online application for PIP using that ‘diagnosis’ then suddenly a lot more money can be obtained. Plus housing benefits/council tax benefits/Mobility car etc etc.
And of course if you have some kids in tow then the bar gets raised again. Plus if one of a couple is ‘disabled’ the other may be able to claim some sort of carers allowance. If you can get a child declared ‘disabled’ as well, ker-ching!
The UK welfare system is a study in what happens when you incentivise people to lie, and don’t ever really check if anyone is lying. Strangely enopugh you get a lot of lying……
bobby b, there’s a video on Youtube, an interview with a former TSA agent. The agent says she saw Somalis travelling out of MSP with “millions of dollars” in cash. Presumably, in their carry ons.
Is this credible? Can a person take that amount of cash out of the country without jumping all sorts of legal hurdles? I thought the most you were allowed to take was $10,000 in cash or by bank transfer.
Is there anything illegal about me liquidating my assets, taking the cash and moving to a non-extradition country (so the IRS can’t get at me)?
Asking for a friend.
GregWA, as long as you fill out your Form 105 in the Customs office, you can carry as much cash as you want. It’s just the people who can’t explain how they have so much money and so don’t want to fill out a government form about it who get in trouble.
And, yeah, the parking lots of foodshelves in certain parts of Minneapolis normally have an awful lot of Mercedes parked there.
Another factor that needs to be considered is mass immigration.
The low wage jobs that people (including myself) used to get, are now taken by immigrants – often working illegally.
So even if such things as “licensing” (and the endless other job destroying regulations) were removed, there would still be a terrible problem.
Unless you have contacts to get a job – you are in terrible trouble.
One way trip to Beachy Head style trouble.
The lady, sadly, does not understand the real situation – the lady believes that people are turning down jobs because of high benefits.
Benefits are not high (not in real life) – and, unless you know the right people (Britain is very much a “who you know” rather than “what you know” sort of country), jobs are not about.
Of course, suicide is legal (and has been for over 50 years), but it is a question of finding the courage to actually do it.
Paul Marks, you’re dealing with a system that considers a white male to be privileged, and thus not deserving of more than bare subsistence levels of support. You can (unfairly) make it on your own simply because you are a White Male, of course!
If you were something different, it would consider you be be the Deserving Poor, not the Devil’s Poor, and you would find the support offered to be much more generous. 82% of Somali families in Minnesota who have been here for decades are on welfare support. Many of them drive nicer vehicles than I do. A Somali woman and three kids in Minneapolis gets support of around $3000 per month, if you count rent subsidies.
bobby b, thanks for the 105 info. How many such forms do you guess have been filed from MN over the last 10-20 years? Might make for an interesting audit? Cross reference the 105s with the “Day Care” licenses.
@bobby b
GregWA, as long as you fill out your Form 105 in the Customs office, you can carry as much cash as you want. It’s just the people who can’t explain how they have so much money and so don’t want to fill out a government form about it who get in trouble.
Ironically, the law that requires you to do this is called the Bank Secrecy Act — an act that, instead of providing bank secrecy, in fact entirely strips you of secrecy in banking. I believe this is what is called “bait and switch.”
I mean next we will be calling into question the patriotism of people who oppose the Patriot Act.
FWIW, I think these so called “suspicious activity reports” that your bank will file as a result of these regulations, are in many ways similar to those British Non crime hate incidents. It is reporting to the government something that is not at all a crime, partly to intimidate you and partly to let the government build a portfolio on you of things they don’t like but that are entirely legal. Our banking systems are just basically an arm of the fourth branch of government these days. That’s probably why they bail them out all the time.
bobby b – yes I know,and I do not disagree with what you are saying.
It may just be that it is my time to go. At 60 I have lived longer than some people I have known – including some well known people, for example Dr Chris Tame – who was a very active libertarian in Britain.
I am hardly alone – a man a few hundred yards away from me got a job, working seven days a week and getting up at 4 AM each day (200 Pounds a week – but he has to buy his own fuel and so on). He almost finished himself yesterday – he is still in this world, but for how much longer I do not know.
The lady who wrote the tweet (if “tweet” is still the correct word for a social media post on what is now X) does not understand what life is like for ordinary people – but that is O.K., I do not begrudge the lady her good fortune – indeed I am pleased that there are some happy, and financially secure, people in the world.
Years ago, in setting up a side business building and rehabbing homes, I bought a lot of used equipment in cash auctions. Best way to equip.
So, many weekly cash bank withdrawals right around $5-8k. (That’s around the range of the normal price of the kinds of equipment we were buying. Cash auctions only.)
Suddenly, the fed people are at the door, and I’m being investigated for “structuring.” (i.e., trying to evade the requirement that banks report withdrawals over $10k by making smaller withdrawals.)
So, not only is it against the law to do specific illegal things, but it is against the law to NOT do specific illegal things. It is against the law to structure your behavior to comply with the law, because that looks suspicious.
It’s a great system!