“By he mid 1930’s, thanks to the New Deal, all that self-reliance had changed prompting Mencken to declare: ‘There is no genuine justice in any scheme of feeding and coddling the loafer whose only ponderable energies are devoted wholly to reproduction. Nine-tenths of the rights he bellows for are really privileges and he does nothing to deserve them.’ Despite the billions spent on an individual, ‘he can be lifted transiently but always slips back again.’ Thus the New Deal had been ‘the most stupendous digenetic* enterprise ever undertaken by man …. We not only acquired a vast population of morons, we have inculcated all morons, young or old, with the doctrine that the decent and industrious people of the country are bound to support them for all time. The effects of that doctrine are bound to be disastrous soon or late.”
From Mencken the American Iconoclast by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
*digenesis di·gen·e·sis (dī-jěn'ĭ-sĭs)
n.
Reproduction in distinctive patterns in alternate generations, typically involving alternating sexual and asexual cycles in succeeding host organisms, as seen in malarial parasites and certain trematode flatworms.
I don't like comparing my fellow human beings (politicians being the exception) to parasites. It is dehumanizing and in some cases uncalled for, but in some ways it is an apt comparison. Let's face it, we have a large, and ever-growing number of citizens who are living off the efforts of their neighbors. Life is often harsh and and obviously there are many who simply can't support themselves, and we must as a society do what we can to take care of those who can't take care of themselves. However, we've gone way beyond the point of caring for the helpless.
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