Why should my hard earned money go to those less fortunate?

[SteelCurtain]

How dare these people have kids!

How dare they use contraception! Or go to a clinic to get free or subsidized services for family planning!

[Cyberman]

How dare they have sex! They should be out there ploughing the fields all day, not each other!

[JuliaL]

We're in, and have always been, culture in transition.  Now it's just happening faster.

Up until recently, the dictum, If you don't work, you don't eat, was beneficial for the perpetuation of society.
Then came the (probably temporary) era of cheaply available energy.
The first to lose their positions were the manual laborers; the ditch diggers and smallholder farmers.
Their jobs were taken by steam then diesel engines.
The displaced concentrated in urban areas and found work in factories as assemblers and machine minders.
I personally threw hundreds or perhaps thousands of such out of work in 20 years of mechanical design in factory automation.
Soon self driving vehicles will take the jobs of thousands of taxi drivers and over the road truckers.
Is everybody here too young to remember when every executive had a small army of secretaries and clericals?
In the not so distant future AI expert systems will outperform in what are currently protected occupations,
Physicians; x-ray interpretation by radiologists, differential diagnostics by internists.
Actuaries (legal bookies) will succumb to systems deep dredging big data.
Creative designers will get laid off by systems that can optimize their own designs entirely internally and that don't need health benefits or sleep.

Eventually there won't be much left humans can do better and only those who can artificially inflate their self worth will be able to claim jobs.
Culture sucks at making rapid changes.  LPW looks like someone who cannot see much beyond his cartoonish biases.
It's possible that technological civilization will crash (pick your favorite apocalypse; biodiversity, climate, nuclear) and 'you don't work means you don't eat' may make a comeback.  But it will be in a much less pleasant world.
I wonder how close Loading Please Wait's job is to being taken by a machine.  Unlike the people he's bashing, it just hasn't happened to him....yet.
Don't worry about the underclass or underpaid Chinese.
Worry about guys like me.

[Cyberman]

How dare they have sex! They should be out there ploughing the fields all day, not each other!

* Unless they invite me to play, obviously.

[vorlon13]

I just realized if everyone was always effusively and totally and continuously generous there would have been little need for Christ to have noted such behavior as being a 'good thing'

[Seraphina]

Oh, and heaven forbid poor people buy things that might bring them some enjoyment and pleasure. So what...because they currently lack employment, they shouldn't be allowed to eat steak as and when their meagre budgets can stretch to it?

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU???? YES!! Someone with a lack of employment should not be allowed to eat steak and expensive foods from our tax payer dollars. Pleasure, comfort, enjoyment and entertainment are not rights!!!

"Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" - it's in the US Declaration of Independence.
What are you - the food police? Why don't you keep your nose out of other people's shopping carts and I won't judge you on what you eat.

[Joods]

According to LPW sure... we can probably "pursue" happiness all we want. We just can't actually have it.

[brewer]

Then give them aftercare, support, and monitoring...

The thing is that aftercare, support, and monitoring is out there and available, even to the poorest. But until the individual decides to stop the death spiral on their own, there is little that can be done. You can give and give and give. If they are not ready, it won't take. It is only a short term fix. Usually to remove some other sort of punishment or threat.

[Cecelia]

I also think it sets a dangerous precedent for the government to tell people what they can or can't do when they're on welfare. I mean... you'll soon have people say "I don't want Single parents to be on welfare because that encourages being a single parent." "I don't want gay people on welfare, because I don't want my money going to support that lifestyle."

[Cyberman]

I mean... you'll soon have people say "I don't want Single parents to be on welfare because that encourages being a single parent."

Yeah, we often get that over here. Or we did before the Daily Fail crowd found immigrants to play with.