I believe that if we did away with welfare, unemployment, etc there would be no shortage of native workers. Currently, we pay people more to sit at home than to work. Remember the adage: If you want more of something subsidize it...
I pretty much agree with your last paragraph as long as they gotta go home first, not receive it here.
>>I believe that if we did away with welfare, unemployment, etc there would be no shortage of native workers. Currently, we pay people more to sit at home than to work. <<
You’ve raised two distinct issues:
We’ll never do away with programs that keep people from starving, or freezing in an unheated house during a northern winter, or dying of a treatable illness that they can’t afford to treat. Granted, private charity is capable of filling some of this need, and if government didn’t do it, charity would almost certainly increase, but, as Hayek maintained (about Great Britain in the 40’s), we are too rich a society to allow the above scenarios to occur if we can avoid them.
The second issue is how much we spend to avoid the above scenarios, and here I very much agree with you. There is no doubt in my mind that we are encouraging unemployment and sloth with the overly-generous government programs currently available.
The trick is to find the proper balance. And to do that we first have to get Obama and his ilk out of power...
A good example was what happened to welfare programs. They grew and grew until the 1990’s and then shrunk dramatically as the payments were reined in and work requirements were added. The same needs to be done with unemployment benefits today, which have gotten completely out of hand.
If Obama had a clue, he’d cut unemployment payments back to 39 weeks and get to see the unemployment rate drop significantly before November 2012...fortunately he’s clueless regarding anything to do with free market economics.