You can't argue with the bottom line
Society
could not function if everybody could just demand anything they wish
from everybody else, always taking and never giving in return. The
temptation to freeload would be just too much. It is much better that
people generally have to do good things to other people before they get
to ask that other people do good things for them. To ensure this, first
there was the concept of "quid pro quo", but when the group grows so
large that anyone can personally know only a small portion of its
members, we need some kind of bookkeeping mechanism to ensure that
people generally give at least as much as they take.
Fortunately, the simple but ingenious invention called "money" serves as a very good bookkeeping mechanism, despite the minor flaws and omissions. Since money is universal and uniform, person A can first do good things to person B, and then get good things done to him by some completely different person C. So if I see a person who has no money and who lives on welfare, I can immediately tell that that so far, that person has taken more from other people than he has given to them, and has been a net negative. Of course such people necessarily exist, but I can't understand why they would be considered morally superior to the rest of us, instead of mockable stupid losers that they are.
I am sure that the leftists now reading this felt moral outrage for my use of the term "stupid losers" in the end of previous paragraph, since they believe that this term is better applied to people who are good solid middle class citizens, taxpayers and pillars of community but who hold an incorrect opinion about some issue that is relatively minor in any normal person's life but happens to be tremendously important to the leftists. On the other hand, a person who consistently fails in every possible aspect of life and ends up homeless sleeping under a bridge, is not "stupid" nor a "loser" at all, but an admirable beacon of wisdom that the rest of us boring normos could learn many important things about "real life".
The central idea of leftism, of course, is that the poorer a person is, the more superior he is in the moral dimension. In this perverse inverted value system of leftists, the people least likely to succeed in various trials and challenges of life also have the best insight on how life should be lived and how society should be organized. I wonder if this principle would also apply to me so that if I, say, decided to drink and gamble away everything I own, quit working and go to live on welfare (or perhaps even go stand on the street begging for money with a ciggy hanging from my mouth), the leftists would then consider me morally superior to them. Probably not, since leftist principles are rarely about any kind of consistency. This is evident from the fact that many leftists are pretty obviously losers themselves, but happily call other people "losers", apparently ignorant of the cliche about people who live in glass houses.
(As a side note, the first place where I fully realized this particular hypocricy with the term "loser" and its many equivalents was when I read John Scalzi's often-linked posting "Being Poor", which is a heart-wrenching list of practical life experiences of poor people. The layout of the blog has changed since then, but at that time, the blog header said "Taunting the Tauntable", which I found somewhat perplexing. How could anyone possibly get more "tauntable" than people who pay $250 for a $200 payday loan or who wear Goodwill underwear? Yet the author did not seem to taunt these people at all, despite the explicit announcement in his very header! I know that I would get mercilessly taunted if I ever admitted getting my underwear at Goodwill, so why this double standard?)
And let's get slightly real for a second. Everyone knows that productive people who have done more for others and thus have a big positive bank account to show for it, generally tend to be better people in most respects compared to people who live on welfare and just keep taking from others. And pretty much everybody who can freely choose where they live demonstrates their real opinions about this matter by their revealed choices: such people usually move as far from the welfare cases to live as close to wealthy people as possible. I don't think that this is just a coincidence. (The Danimal once quipped that people in a rich neighbourhood are very unlikely to mug you, although they are more likely to organize a hostile takeover of your company.)
I have often wondered what possible motivation the people who generally only take have to bite the hand that feeds them by demonizing the people who produce and give. For this reason, it would be interesting to watch what would happen if all welfare transfers were completely cut off, vividly illustrating to everyone who exactly really needs whom. People who live on other people's expense would loudly oppose this, of course, coming up with all kinds of rationalizations why they are entitled to money from other people. The leftists would naturally scream the loudest for the end of their free ride: I don't know if the English language has an equivalent to the old Finnish proverb "The dog that was hit by the tossed stick is the one that yelps", which I believe applies here quite well.
Fortunately, the simple but ingenious invention called "money" serves as a very good bookkeeping mechanism, despite the minor flaws and omissions. Since money is universal and uniform, person A can first do good things to person B, and then get good things done to him by some completely different person C. So if I see a person who has no money and who lives on welfare, I can immediately tell that that so far, that person has taken more from other people than he has given to them, and has been a net negative. Of course such people necessarily exist, but I can't understand why they would be considered morally superior to the rest of us, instead of mockable stupid losers that they are.
I am sure that the leftists now reading this felt moral outrage for my use of the term "stupid losers" in the end of previous paragraph, since they believe that this term is better applied to people who are good solid middle class citizens, taxpayers and pillars of community but who hold an incorrect opinion about some issue that is relatively minor in any normal person's life but happens to be tremendously important to the leftists. On the other hand, a person who consistently fails in every possible aspect of life and ends up homeless sleeping under a bridge, is not "stupid" nor a "loser" at all, but an admirable beacon of wisdom that the rest of us boring normos could learn many important things about "real life".
The central idea of leftism, of course, is that the poorer a person is, the more superior he is in the moral dimension. In this perverse inverted value system of leftists, the people least likely to succeed in various trials and challenges of life also have the best insight on how life should be lived and how society should be organized. I wonder if this principle would also apply to me so that if I, say, decided to drink and gamble away everything I own, quit working and go to live on welfare (or perhaps even go stand on the street begging for money with a ciggy hanging from my mouth), the leftists would then consider me morally superior to them. Probably not, since leftist principles are rarely about any kind of consistency. This is evident from the fact that many leftists are pretty obviously losers themselves, but happily call other people "losers", apparently ignorant of the cliche about people who live in glass houses.
(As a side note, the first place where I fully realized this particular hypocricy with the term "loser" and its many equivalents was when I read John Scalzi's often-linked posting "Being Poor", which is a heart-wrenching list of practical life experiences of poor people. The layout of the blog has changed since then, but at that time, the blog header said "Taunting the Tauntable", which I found somewhat perplexing. How could anyone possibly get more "tauntable" than people who pay $250 for a $200 payday loan or who wear Goodwill underwear? Yet the author did not seem to taunt these people at all, despite the explicit announcement in his very header! I know that I would get mercilessly taunted if I ever admitted getting my underwear at Goodwill, so why this double standard?)
And let's get slightly real for a second. Everyone knows that productive people who have done more for others and thus have a big positive bank account to show for it, generally tend to be better people in most respects compared to people who live on welfare and just keep taking from others. And pretty much everybody who can freely choose where they live demonstrates their real opinions about this matter by their revealed choices: such people usually move as far from the welfare cases to live as close to wealthy people as possible. I don't think that this is just a coincidence. (The Danimal once quipped that people in a rich neighbourhood are very unlikely to mug you, although they are more likely to organize a hostile takeover of your company.)
I have often wondered what possible motivation the people who generally only take have to bite the hand that feeds them by demonizing the people who produce and give. For this reason, it would be interesting to watch what would happen if all welfare transfers were completely cut off, vividly illustrating to everyone who exactly really needs whom. People who live on other people's expense would loudly oppose this, of course, coming up with all kinds of rationalizations why they are entitled to money from other people. The leftists would naturally scream the loudest for the end of their free ride: I don't know if the English language has an equivalent to the old Finnish proverb "The dog that was hit by the tossed stick is the one that yelps", which I believe applies here quite well.
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