One can make a case – not a good one, much less an ethical one, but nonetheless – for providing the indigent with subsidized (that is, at gunpoint) food. But “government cheese” has become lobster and prime rib.
Literally.
“The poor” eat better than I do. Because they dine at my expense. And wherever they wish to dine.
I treat myself once in awhile to a nice ribe-eye, some fresh sushi. But I have limited means – especially given taxes that take a third off the top, just for openers – so like anyone else, I budget what I spend on food.
But if you’ve got EBT – Electronic Balance Transfer – it’s free.
The other day, I was waiting to check out at our local gourmet food store. Nothing in this place is either inexpensive or what you’d call a necessary basic staple of the table. Imported gruyere is as close to government cheese as you’ll find. Yet there it was, at the little station at the checkout where you swipe your credit card: We Gladly Accept EBT.
They are now rubbing our faces in it. Not only has any social stigma associated with forcing other people to pay your bills largely dissipated – now they are providing inducements to go on the dole.
Consider the EBT card itself. It’s designed to mimic a credit card – so as to spare the freeloaders any psychic pain associated with food stamps. Or any obvious sign of their dependence on others via the fist of the state. The state seems to want to make them feel good about being dependents. Just swipe your EBT card. Just like a credit card.
Makes you almost feel as though you’re paying your own way.
Government produces nothing – so it cannot understand why they CAN’T just give everything away.
But a few dead freeloaders would make for well-fed gators… (…coyotes / Wolves / Dogs / Rats / vultures)
Another angle of the armored police vehicle fleeing the protestors who want to kill them, and backing up and falling off the overpass.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atmANeypQs4
If they don’t capitulate soon, their technological superiority will not be sufficient to protect them from the sheer numbers of the masses. The spontaneous order and problem-solving skills of the many, will always eventually overcome the oppression and the regimentation of the few.
The doors and gates of their castles will be stormed and torn asunder. All ill-gotten gains will be re-looted and plundered.
If they were really merely trying to help the least fortunate, they could grow their own food and sell it in their own institutions. Educate and train doctors and nurses in their own clinics. Build communities for retirees. And so forth.
What they seem to be doing, is to leverage the bottom 20% of our society to collapse the upper 80% of society and gain 100% rule over the survivors in the resulting 100% dependent society.
Somehow the cards also have a cash withdrawal-able balance besides food.
Many groceries store in Vegas have people hanging out near the entrance trying to sell you their food stamps for 50 cents on the dollar.
Clayton County Georgia runs out dey food stamps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufk7IXdxc-c
Aunt copes with loss of young nephews left alone in a home that caught fire – needs to determine if her purse burned up – that’s “got her food stamp card and everything in it”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2u1Uyju8BA
Gibs me my food stamps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTZEmqDawg0
Indeed.
But, I suspect they are playing with fire.
It’s one thing to enact programs that force people to subsidize basic staples and so on for people who are obviously destitute and incapable of work.
It is quite another to use state violence to take away the limited resources of people who work hard, every day, so that some layabout lout can eat steak, lay around all day and watch TeeVee and shit out one new taxpayer dependent after the next.
It is now so egregiously, so obviously, state-enforced theft for the benefit of absolute cretins that the victims are becoming restless.
They may soon become more than merely restless.
Armored police pushed off a bridge and falling 50 feet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj-DzCTtkng
I see prisoners. Prisoners in a 387,000 square mile prison named Egypt. Forced to wear clothing and shoes made by international corporations. Taught to enjoy selecting, and maintaining their pathogen riddled rags.
We are rich, they think, we have clothing and shelter. Even though we are far more constrained than animals, somehow we are their superiors, they imagine.
All of us converse in the forcibly inculcated regional prison-jargon of Modern-Standard-Arabic. Forced to buy machines to travel. To use concrete roads and live in concrete structures like battery hens. The structures have rights, not the people. The people must maintain, and never defile these structures and temples of their unseen captors. It is their commonwealth, they are told.
They are not free to use the world, the way an animal is. They must purchase power, water, and food from immensely power oligarch overlords. Only they are authorized to use resources, and to sell it to them. The cartels also concoct all manner of socialisms and capitalisms and spread all manner of lies.
Their only freedom is to fight off the old control group to replace it with a new group. A group which decides how they live and die. A group that will also come into their concrete cages day or night as it pleases, and continue to treat them like urban poultry. Give us your eggs, we command you, or we will hurt you. Stay in your cage unless you are coming out to produce things for us, to serve us, to praise us, or to buy things from us.
There is no possibility of self-determination. The gang owns the commons, the roads, and paths. The gang takes taxes and builds things with their money that they have no ownership in. The so called progress is a farce. For every single material gain, two more of your rights are forfeit.
Only businesses have the right to buy, sell, process, and produce. And businesses only temporarily exist at the pleasure of the state.
You have no right to provide for yourself. Realization and anger over that fact is what began and will sustain these soon-to-be worldwide riots.
Mohammed Bouazizi, an 26-year-old man trying to support his family by selling fruits and vegetables in Sidi Bouzid, doused himself in paint thinner and set himself on fire in front of a local city office.
Police had confiscated his produce cart and produce saying he required a permit to sell things and then beat him up when he resisted. Officials refused his to listen to him or hear his complaint. He was taken to a hospital near Tunis for treatment of his third-degree burns .
Bouazizi’s act of desperation highlights the public’s boiling frustration over living in national prison states, being victimes of police violence and harassment, not being permitted to work and exchange freely, and the utter lack of human rights and simple human dignity.
The protests begin in Sidi Bouzid that same day. They quickly spread across the region, then the country. Then the rest of the Middle East. Even the assemblies are forbidden and regulated into impossibiltiy here, but it is unknown how long that will continue.
Every city has an office that declares you to be unemployed. Unable to provide for yourself, except if you follow all the rules of and endure all the predations of their prison staff. It has deteriorated to the point where, instead of producing and exchanging things, the most productive and capable people in the world are relegated to only discussing and hypothesizing about what we would be producing, if our national prison state were to permit it.