Help me respond to this letter in my local paper.

[carrowsboy]

Any help is greatly appreciated. Though i admit it would be priceless if this guy's Social Security, medicare & welfare options were "phased out" and the next day he gets into an accident leaving him a parapalegic. Then let's see how he how self-sufficient and productive he'd be.

http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%2FRTD_BasicArticle&%09s=1045855935005&c=MGArticle&cid=1137833863811&path=%21editorials%21letters

"Socialism Encourages Culture of Dependency"

"Editor, Times-Dispatch: Your review of the so-called end of welfare talks about a person who was once on welfare but supposedly isn't now. Yet he's on disability? If he was being paid not to work by welfare before, and now he's still being paid not to work but this time via disability, then what's so different?

This individual you featured is supposedly on disability because of Attention Deficit Disorder. Yet there is a vast selection of drugs that supposedly treat ADD. If ADD is truly a valid medical diagnosis and it's treatable, why isn't he on medicine and at work?

Putting a 30-year-old, smart, able-bodied individual on disability is disastrous for both him and society at large.

Bribing people to remain idle sets them up for low self-esteem, temptation from drug dealers, depression, and social isolation. In contrast, work promotes mental and physical health, self-esteem, and a sense of self-worth.

Welfare (under any name) undermines society. Taxpayers are forced (at gunpoint) to support people who won't work, and the economy is deprived of the creativity and enterprise the switched-off person might have contributed.

Certainly those who truly care for their children would rather see them become self-sufficient and productive, rather than become wards of the state in a rigged, state-sanctioned begging scheme.

The Libertarian alternative of getting government out of the way will achieve better results. Phase out Social Security, Medicare, and welfare. Treating individuals like adults and allowing them to become more responsible for their own care and feeding is the only way out.

Socialism doesn't work. Marc Montoni. richmond."

[Viva_La_Revolution]

1. temptation from drug dealers

Oh yes! My mother, who has been on disability for 10 years because of MS, Arthritis and diabetes... I have to beat those dealers away from her door with a base ball bat!

:rofl:

[Nomen Tuum]

2. Wait for this clown to have a stroke.

He'll change his tune. I worked with a Libertarian Idiot for years who floated in his Ayn Randian Lasseiz Fairyland of no government. Since he was a minister, he didn't pay into what he called "Socialist Security"...

Then he had a stroke.

He went through his savings and wound up on Supplemental Security Income.

Now he sings a different tune (Wow, I sure am glad I have SSI!)

[carrowsboy]

3. exactly

Do people just not think about the future anymore?

[Nomen Tuum]

6. No because he thought Jesus was going to rapture him

For years he went on and on with the rapture crap He didn't plan for the long term because he was sure that Jesus was going to rapture him "in a week or two".

What is so scary is that 90% of the Republicans in Congress believe the same thing!

[gratuitous]

4. His letter is such a disconnected mess

It's difficult to know where to start or stop on a critique of it. Who's training guns on taxpayers to support people who don't work? How does a mutual decision by all of society undermine society? Is Mr. Montoni a medical doctor? What are his qualifications for diagnosing the man in question? Is he competent to render a medical opinion on the case?

Mr. Montoni has many axes to grind. It's a shame the Times-Dispatch afforded him precious inches of column space that might have been used better to edify its readership. Perhaps that's the place to start: With a letter to the public editor, posing the above questions and asking why the Times-Dispatch saw fit to publish such a hateful, uninformed screed?

[FormerDittoHead]

5. Socialism doesn't work - neither do slippery slope and false choices..

If we can strip this argument down to its essentials, we have a choice between socialism and no government at all? That's it?

Is there anyone suggesting that what we need is a completely socialist state? I ask because it seems that the writer is answering just such a suggestion.

Libertarians dwell in false choices. Is there no possibility for having a world where businesses and the wealthy are allowed to thrive, but are balanced by a set of laws and regulations to protect people from their well recorded excesses? (and if you don't know what I'm talking about, Enron and Tyco cases would be two good starting points).

Is there no possible senario of having a society having an environment which allows people to become rich and achieve excellence while at the same time making sure children don't die because their parents just don't happen to have the money for expensive operations?

I'm tired of these simple minded arguments which suggest that we have only two choices (freedom or slavery, etc).

If we put our minds to it, the choices we have are limited only by our imagination, rather than the simple minded black and white world such writers present to us.

The writer suggests a libertarian government would work best. How does he know? No where in the history of man kind has a pure "libertarian" society existed just as there has never been a purely democratic one.

His suggestion sounds familiar that we usurp all of our institutions to use our society as some economic laboratory and painful transition to achieve some kind of mythical utopia. That's the identical argument Marx had for socialism. But totalitarian socialism never led to a egalitarian communist state and the same can be said for this writer's libertarian fantasy.

I understand the appeal to providing simple answers. Sometimes, however, simple answers can disguise simple stupidity as well.