I on the other hand believe that handing money out to people for nothing is a recipe for dystopia. Different strokes I suppose.

It still ignores the fact that in the last century and a half, we’ve seen tens of millions of jobs lost in agriculture due to automation, but the labor force today in the US is larger than the entire population of the country was in 1900 when over 40% of the labor forced worked in that very industry.

Will there be pain for those that don’t keep up? Of course, but there is no growth or change without pain.

A perfect example of how damaging such a program would be to the economy is West Virginia. The old coal mining towns are dead, done, kaput. But because we have layered social welfare programs into the mix, we have provided these towns an incentive to remain in a barely subsistence level state when the fact is they should be ghost towns. Rather, because we want to “help” people, we provide them with the means of survival rather than the incentive to leave and start again. They are literally killing themselves with drugs and alcohol that they purchase with tax payer money.

The reality of the world is that people don’t change when their survival is handled, they end up living in misery and despair and raising families in the same state. Providing monetary assistance on the scale of social welfare programs does quite the opposite of what its proponents believe. It does however provide the people who support it an out. It allows them to feel like they are doing something (asking others to pay for their virtue) so they can sleep at night with the belief they have made a difference.