CARLTON FLETCHER: Home of the brave, land of the freebies

What a fool believes he sees, the wise man has the power to reason away.

— The Doobie Brothers

It’s more than a cottage industry now, this glut of agencies and nonprofits — whose principles do make a profit, rest assured — and advisors who solicit the “poor” to come to them for relief.

It’s now a multibillion-dollar cash cow that allows these agencies and individuals to claim they’re “doing good” while making a decent enough living and reinforces the notion held by a growing number of Americans that there is no need to work for a living when someone’s there to point you to the next handout.

The people who do actually work for a living — the ever-shrinking middle class — are growing wearier by the day at having their taxes pay for able-bodied individuals’ food, transportation, housing, education and medical care while they struggle at sometimes two and three jobs just to provide the same necessities for their families.

People want to place blame on the individuals receiving these benefits, and they are of course complicit in that they’ll stand in lines and fill out forms for each new freebie that each new group is handing out. But the deep-seated root of this problem lies with a government that has allowed the welfare system to go unchecked for so long that generational poverty has become a way of life for going on four successive generations and counting.

It’s not that big government is big-hearted and wants every citizen to have their share of the American dream, as the more liberal-minded in the government will tell you. And it’s not that people receiving assistance are all deadbeats who have no pride, as people who call themselves conservatives claim.

The problem is that there is so much government money going to these agencies whose share of the largess is determined by how many they’re able to sign up for each new program that pushes our national debt even deeper into the trillions. The person looking for a way to feed his or her family may get $90 worth of charity, but the organization/agency signing him or her up gets enough to pay sometimes exorbitant salaries and other associated costs.

U.S. leaders started what has grown into out-of-control, rampant giveaway programs to help “widows and orphans.” Now, those same people who have a tough enough time surviving without help are pushed to the back of the lines by men and women in their 20s and 30s whose only affliction is an allergy to putting in a day’s work to earn a living.

Individuals now shun manual labor or even a free education that would provide unlimited job opportunities and instead use their time to find ways to “beat the system,” to get even more of those pots of free stuff. And their often illegal — certainly unethical — pursuits are encouraged by those same agencies, institutions and individuals who are looking to add numbers to their rolls so that they can increase the amount of funding they receive.

The sad thing is, though, these people and agencies are not truly helping these individuals — and they’re certainly hurting the people who fund each new giveaway — by pointing them toward the freebies. What they’re doing is robbing them of their self-worth and reinforcing the misconception that a person can live a productive life as a lifelong member of the welfare system.

Yes, there are people who need help in this country, people who, for circumstances beyond their control, can’t survive without some kind of intervention. But the people whose only holdback to independence is the dependence they’ve developed as they’re encouraged — by case workers, pastors, “community activists” — to get in line for the next big giveaway increasingly find themselves unwilling and unable to seek the self-satisfaction that comes with receiving pay for honest labor.

By robbing more and more in each successive generation of this basic element of what it means to live a productive life and not rely on the handouts of others, we’re chipping away at the work ethic that was essential to the development of the most powerful and innovative country in the history of mankind. The loss is not just measured in dignity either. It’s measured in the decline of a civilization that the rich sitting in their mansions and ivory towers and the out-of-touch politicians playing their stupid partisan games simply refuse to see.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ABH_Fletcher.