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…
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