[Gnnr]

Originally Posted by WanganRunner

I'm not any more for welfare as a handout than you probably are, but telling ANY sizable contingent of the population to "GTFO" doesn't work, even if it's what is fair.

A market-based meritocracy economy is indeed very fair, but it does have shortcomings when applied to reality. A meritocracy (i.e. hands-off free-market economy) produces winners and losers, and we'd all like to tell ourselves that the winner should win, the losers should lose, and everyone should fend for themselves.

Unfortunately that won't really work. The American gene-pool produces born winners, born losers, and then people who could go either way (the latter being the vast majority). What do we do with the born losers, the people who are just not equipped to ever "win" in a winner-take-all economy? This is a decent-sized chunk of society, and you can't have a big chunk of society being consistently marginalized and unhappy unless you want to have crime skyrocket, have economic issues (see: current housing crisis), or potentially breed a revolution (violent or political).

So what do you do with these people? You can't very well kill or deport them, and you also can't expect them to somehow leave on their own. No, unfortunately it is the responsibility of the "winners" to take care of the "losers" to a certain extent, if for no reason other than self-preservation via keeping the nation stable. The assistance doesn't necessarily need to be in the form of a straight-up government handout, but there DO need to be safety nets of some kind.

It isn't exactly fair, and it definitely doesn't fit into the ideological purity demanded by today's GOP, but that doesn't make it not true. Consider it a cost of doing business.

Creating permanent underclasses is a nasty business, as numerous societies throughout history have learned.

Word. Once you get into higher level politics you start to see that social darwinism doesn't work out. This country learned many times, sometimes brutally, that it can't function without those at the bottom of the pyramid.