Responding to Taking Welfare and Hating It

Posted on February 17, 2012

 

Will Wilkinson has a post at the Economist Democracy in America blog - Taking welfare and hating it - responding to the big New York Times story about people’s conflicts with the welfare state, a story that we covered here.  It’s worth reading it all, but here’s part of it blockquoted.  Wilkinson:

Mostly I find a faithful depiction of a common and interesting conflict within many Americans between their de facto dependence on government transfers and their closely-held ideals of independence and self-reliance.

To understand all this, I think it’s important to acknowledge that our so-called “social insurance” programmes, such as Social Security and Medicare, produce a sense of dependency by design…But, like it or not, many Americans do find this dependency humiliating…