[thechat] canada's new democratic party

[John Handelaar]

On Mon, 2003-01-27 at 18:48, Tara Cleveland wrote:
>
> I'm really sick of people who say "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and
> then implement sickening programs like these that are punitive, cruel,
> mean-spirited and don't save money.

And there's the big one.  Don't.  Save.  Money.

Some of the most spectacular examples of profligate
"big government" are the ones which conservatives make
not in the name of efficiency, but social engineering
unrelated to what they're supposed to be doing.

In the UK we have the Child Support Agency, created
in order to "save taxpayers' money" by finding and billing
the absent (usually) fathers of single mothers claiming
benefits.

In order to save a hundred quid a week, each one of those
'welfare moms' has thousands of pounds of government salary,
office expense, and what have you expended on their account.

It would have been shut down by now but the redundancy
money makes it 'uneconomic' in any timeframe shorter than
5 years.  We usually have elections every four years. So
chances are this thing'll live forever.

Mercifully the idea that Conservatives are financially
prudent seems now to have been discredited indefinitely
in the UK.  But the point remains:  Conservatism has
*nothing* to do with economics.  It's a social engineering
thing.  Every Conservative government does uneconomic
things (usually involving making the lives of poor people
more difficult) *purely* to satisfy some of its more
bigoted supporters.  In this case it's about punishing
people who 'failed' to sustain a nuclear family for some
reason, but check your local newspaper for regional
variations.

[Oh:  and before someone says 'why should UK taxpayers
subsidise feckless absentee fathers?', the answer is quite
obvious.  Because it's *cheaper* than all the alternatives.
I'm a socialist.  Sue me.  I'm also a liberal, which means
I'm opposed both to the government wasting money *and*
involving itself in the personal affairs of its citizens,
which are none of the government's feckin' business.]

Man, there are some poor people in the UK.  But generally
speaking, people don't starve to death here.  Which they
clearly bloody do in the US.  Why on earth a Canadian would
wish to emulate that is beyond me, but then hey - not *my*
elected government.

--
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John Handelaar

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