Comments by "iggle" (@iggle6448) on "Theodore Dalrymple - The Truth About Crime" video.

If you were also to say 'the governmental system that shunts all its mistakes onto an inept and inadequate welfare system' then I'd cheer louder than anyone at your assessment of a vast and immoral disaster. This view is most certainly shared by a huge number of people in the UK. But the governmental snafus and fubars are where the actual problem is. (Would it make a difference if most of our governments were made up of ordinary reasonably intelligent people who are NOT from Eton and other public schools, Oxbridge, and the finance industry...?? I think yes.)
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@OkTxSheepLady I agree that the welfare state is very beneficial for its managers, the gvt. Instead of investing our National Insurance payments it spends them on whatever it wants and its usually not on welfare. Also a welfare system allows gvts to play fast and loose with other areas of policy - they fuck up the economy? Oh that's ok the welfare system can mop up the human fall out. In fact a relatively high proportion of welfare system expenditure could be tracked back to this sort of cause. But I think you're not British? I don't think any Brit would say that welfare recipients are 'slave owners' benefiting from the hard work of others under their command. You'd have to be British to understand why /how it doesn't work like that. In fact, it's rather the other way round, a good number of Brits would like to contribute £more if it would make the welfare system actually work well for everyone. Plus, some Brits think they own welfare recipients and can treat them like dirt with fewer rights. (As has happened with some schemes that various psycho gvts have cooked up!) Just to add that a couple of years ago, the UN Special Rapporteur on Poverty investigated the UK's welfare system that fails so many and called it 'worse than Dickensian'. It's a truthful, fascinating, independent and hard-hitting report available online if you'd like to find out more.
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@OkTxSheepLady Ah, OK, thank you for your explanation. We, like most Europeans, have a very different perspective. Everyone here pays into a gvt administered National Insurance scheme (since 1947) and via taxation (everyone - e.g. part of the tax on the sweeties and toys that children buy from their pocket money goes towards the welfare system too). It could have been set up as a private while-nation health and social security insurance scheme but wasn't - it was introduced by a Labour gvt. In short, think of it as an insurance policy - when someone gets ill and/or loses their job they apply to the insurance company which everyone else has a policy with and the company pays for healthcare and/or your basic living costs when you've fulfilled all the strict rules for payout. Most welfare systems work exactly like this. Most people are glad that they DON'T have to claim. Most people are pleased that the insurance is there for all even though others might get more out of it. National Insurance/taxes are also enforced with criminal penalties - we all pay into it and it's distributed according to qualified need - but no one looks at that as 'secondhand stealing'. The basic principle is for the basic communal good. I don't want hordes of homeless people sleeping on my property or along the High Street, or burgling my home. I don't want people to lose their homes because they had to pay for cancer/stroke/heart/accident injuries. Nor do I want people going to work with transmissible diseases to infect us with because they can't afford to stay off work and get treatment. Looking at it another way, what do you think about some of your taxes paying for jails and the criminal justice system, or for state education, for the FBI, for your national government etc? Also, I assume you're aware of LBJ's great wheeze to pull in more Democrat votes by instituting a massive nationwide welfare scheme which made it easier to claim benefits than working, which undermining not only the family unit amongst poor people but also skewed their education and the job market so badly that it's never recovered? Our welfare system isn't like that. I think you're right to be upset with yours in the US, but not at individuals - your gvt actively caused this dire state of affairs, not individuals who have been and still are conditioned to be co-dependent. with gvt.
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@OkTxSheepLady I do so admire Thomas Sowell, he's a scholar of great integrity and incisive intelligence. Similarly, Candace Owens has written so clearly of the way African American people have been corralled on the 'Democrat Plantation'. It's horrendous that they and, it has to be said, disadvantaged white people have been used in this way. It's happened in the UK too to some extent. We're not supposed to notice it. Instead, we're supposed to go after the victims of these vote-catching scams instead of seeing the users for what they are. It's good to see our traditional Labour voters ditching that party in their millions now.
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@mrror8933 To be fair, each gvt sells itself on their continued support for and enhancement of the welfare state. A portion of our taxes are explicitly for our welfare state. Thus it's part of the social contract, and it is well argued that citizens and taxpayers are within their rights to feel entitled to its benefits. i might have the wrong end of the stick though about what you've said - please elaborate if you wish.
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