A li'l Bachmann news for SamiraFollow

I thought Samira would like 'cause I know how much she loves farming subsidies...

Maybe she's on her list of socialists in Congress!

And Grassley, no surprise there.



....Yeah.

There are hypocrites on both sides of the aisle, blah blah blah. This is just a pet peeve of mine.

I find it hard to believe that the best the Left can come up with to attack Bachmann about is that she inherited a piece of a farm which receives what appears to be a small portion of its profits from farm subsidies.

How do you equate a farm subsidy with welfare? Farm subsidies are generally created by the government to encourage farmers to grow (or not grow) the correct amounts of various agricultural products. While they may certainly benefit the farmers, the intent is to benefit other areas of the economy. Welfare generally refers to payments made directly to an individual purely to help that person out at other people's expense. The two are not even vaguely related.

What a crock story. Sorry. I'm just finding it hard to believe that anyone with a brain in their heads actually thinks this means anything...

Here and I thought

andmade that point already.

Ok, we've established that Gbaji is okay with $28,000 in unneccessary spending. Let's see what the limit is!

Her farm should quit being lazy and pull itself up by its own bootstraps.

Because it's not called welfare, it's called subsidies. Nevermind that it's the exact same thing just by a different name. Because it is a different name and that's all that counts.

When Conservatives oppose "welfare", we are specifically speaking of this:

Financial or other aid provided, especially by the government, to people in need

Farm subsidies in the US are this:

Monetary assistance granted by a government to a person or group in support of an enterprise regarded as being in the public interest.


They are not the same. They are not given to recipients for the same reason, and do not serve the same purpose. A subsidy is done for purely economic reasons. They stand on their own economically. Welfare is granted for purely social reasons, with a detrimental impact on the economy.

We don't lose money from subsidies. We get it back in the form of trade advantages and/or cost savings on food and/or better crop yield potentials nationwide in the future. We don't get the money we spend on welfare back. What we get is another generation with a higher rate of non-productiveness then the last.

Subsidies are a good idea most of the time. Welfare is a bad idea almost all of the time.


Do I need to go on? Or has it sunk in yet that these two things are completely different?

Not that old saw again! Did you miss the whole "by the government" part?

We're not opposed to helping people out. We're opposed to creating a monolithic government program by which to do it. You do understand the difference between me choosing to spend my own money helping people, and you choosing how to spend my money to help people, right?

Silly me that I might want to actually have a choice about how and to whom my charity gets spent. Doubly so when increasingly the money to "help people out" seems not to actually be about helping them out, but about trapping them in the welfare system itself. Oh, and making sure they get bussed to the next political rally of course...


We can debate about the reason I and most conservatives oppose welfare programs if you want. But can you please not invent completely bogus reasons?

Welfare is bad when women have 12 babies in order to get more welfare funding.

However, since the same people who hate welfare also tend to hate abortions, there's no simple solution, now is there?

Didn't stop you from tossing out the strawman anyway though, did it?


Look. I honestly believe that when people receive money via private charitable giving, they tend to appreciate it more, and be much more focused on not having to live on someone else's dime (and perhaps even give back if/when they do get out of their current troubles). I believe that when the government does the exact same thing, two things happen:

1. People feel that they are "entitled" to the money. They are less likely to take action to get themselves out of the state they are in, and certainly don't feel like they "owe" anyone anything.

2. The funds themselves are subject to greater corruption and waste. A private individual can decide that someone isn't following the rules or doesn't want to improve themselves, or whatever and cut off the funds. The government "can't".


Charity is ultimately about moral choice. It's not just "does this person need this", but also "does this person deserve this". But the government can't make a moral choice. It has to write its rules down and follow them. Doing otherwise would subject it to cries of discrimination. An individual can decide that the bum he's been helping is a horrible person and stop helping him (or at least threaten to do this). The government can only look at the qualifications on paper. It cannot make a moral choice.


It is because of this that both of those problems occur. The costs increase because money ends out going to those who don't both need *and* deserve them, and because the requirements are written down, it makes it both easier for someone to find ways to qualify for them, but also makes it harder for people to get out of them. The lack of ability to make a moral choice means that the government can't consider the "deserve" component. It can't look at a recipient, make a decision about that specific person, and then decide if that person is worth helping out. It simply can't make that decision. Thus, it really only works on "need".

That in turn further increases the corruption (find ways to work the system to appear to "need" the funds and you get a free ride). It also pushes along the sense of entitlement. If I know that the guy helping me out could choose tomorrow for whatever reason he chooses to cut me off, I'm going to darn well make sure I'm working to correct the situation I'm in. I'm going to be thankful for the opportunity and not want to blow it. But if I know that the government will continue to help me out as long as I "need" it, I kinda don't have a motivation to improve my life.


And while we can all sit here and pretend that no one would choose to be poor if they had a choice, the reality is that a hell of a lot of people will simply fail to try as hard to succeed as long as they know that the government will be there for them. it's a nameless faceless source of support. It's a lot harder to take money from a person and then let them down. It's trivially easy to do so when it's the government and it doesn't really have any feelings...


Charity should be done by people. I'm not sure why anyone would think it's a good idea to do it any other way.

Woah, woah.

This is news to me.