| Reasonable said: What I find even more bizzare with respect to the looting is how many people identified so far had no actual reason - by that I mean they were not all deprived, poor or unemployed (not that being so excuses it anyway) but that many turned out to be employed or perfectly capable of buying what they want. |
Yeah, I think HappySquirrel nailed it earlier: basically, this is one fucked up, spoiled, deeply amoral generation, and it's a problem that cuts across class lines. The interviews I saw with looters all pretty much boiled down to, "We're not afraid of being arrested, there's no real consequences for doing it, so why shouldn't we get some free stuff?" Whatever their other myriad failing, I think they were being honest.
As for welfare, I think Bastiat said it best: "Every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all." The government is not the society, it is only a part of it. I'm all for a safety net for those who truly need it, but I can't help but feel that the safety net turns into a hammock in no time flat under government management. Maybe it's just the nature of bureaucracy. A bureaucrat can write a million checks, but he isn't capable of actually caring about a single one of those people. They're all just case file numbers to him. The whole thing is just so deeply impersonal as to be almost dehumanizing. Private charities, on the other hand, seem to do a much better job precisely because they actually do care. I'm sure it also helps that if they don't do a good job and too much of their donations get eaten up in administration, watchdog groups will blow the whistle on them and people will start giving elsewhere. Whereas with the government, it's just a profoundly unhealthy monopoly.
