COMMENTER HIRAGHM on this Michelle Malkin post about food stamps.

First comment:

Your desire to masturbate doesn’t grant you the right to control my life. (the editorial “you” and “my” in this case). And no, I’ve never received food stamps.

I’m not only sick of these back-door attempts to control my life, I’ m sick of alleged conservatives falling for it.

Oppose welfare if you want, go for it. But, to wax Randian for a moment, you can’t have Falstaff and have him thin. Either you live in a country that lets people, including children, starve to death, or you create this safety net to salve your own conscience.

Your payoff is not having to live in a country where children can starve to death. Your payoff is using tax payer dollars to make yourself feel all good and noble and warm and fuzzy.

Your payoff is not, cannot ever be, control over other humans’ lives. What next? Telling people they can only use food stamps at Wal-mart or Costco? Telling people they can only buy Borden milk with food stamps, and no other brand?

Alleged conservatives whine and moan about, to use an over-abused metaphor, giving a man a fish instead of teaching him to fish. What you want to do is give him a fishing pole, and because you gave him the fishing pole, dictating where he can fish, what kind of bait he can use, what size of fish he can keep, what kind of fish he can eat, how he can cook it.

What do you want? Do you want to help people become self-sufficient, or do you want to keep them alive so you can continue feeling superior to them? If you make these decisions for them, how and when are they going to develop the ability to make them for themselves? Even if they, in the future, continue buying only gov’t-approved foods, that’s Pavlovian reflex, not decision-making. And you’ve stolen their lives from them.

My elder brother, unfortunately, was taught using the “word-unit” method, unlike the rest of us. This meant he never learned to read a word he hadn’t been taught to read. Likewise, by dictating what a person can buy with food stamps or other welfare, they’ll never learn to make their own decisions about how to handle their money.

What really outrages me is this: this says to children, “Because your parents take food stamps, you can’t have candy. We want you to be alive, this doesn’t mean we want you to be happy.”

And the hilarious part of all this is, fine, they use food stamps only to buy milk and wheat germ, and broccoli and whatever other disgusting idiot food health nuts with gov’t influence dictate. That’ll still free up whatever other funds they get to buy awful products like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. So, it accomplishes nothing, except let the progressives climax over micro-managing other peoples’ lives.

Second comment:

In the Antebellum South, blacks had guaranteed employment, guaranteed shelter, guaranteed health care, guaranteed food. Someone else was paying for all of these things for them (quality of such is fodder for another argument).

In return, they had no decisions to make; they were told where, when and how to work. Their food was selected for them. They got the healthcare someone else saw fit to give them. Their shelter was whatever someone else decided they should have.

In the Antebellum North, immigrants had no guarantee of shelter, employment, health care or food. (again, the abuse of workers during the same era is fodder for that other argument). They could work for whomever they chose; they could do whatever work they chose, they could live where ever they chose, they could eat whatever they chose, they could seek whatever health care they chose.

Why do we consider those Northern immigrants better off than the Southern blacks?

Welfare creates dependence; this is almost a conservative axiom. What is being suggested is that, what little improvement in a person’s life, (or family’s lives) is to be marginalized by taking away from them the decision-making that differentiates the free from the slave. To turn a program intended to buoy up people in temporary difficult straits into the chains of slavery.

If you don’t like the food choices they make using the food stamps, then stop the food stamp program, don’t use it as an excuse to control them.

Third comment:

I’m rofling at the sudden outbreak of progressivism on this blog.

Do you *really* think the progressives *started* these “Great Society”, “New Deal” et al programs in order to help people? The goal all along was to control people. To set the precedent for a sugar tax, a Big Mac Tax (a tobacco tax, cough cough). Obamacare was the goal; how often do we hear politicians and other progressive-sounding idiots claim how much healthcare is costing “us”? There’s a commercial on TV proclaiming the costs of tobacco to companies due to lost productivity… ignoring entirely that said productivity doesn’t belong to the company, but the individual.

You either do-good because it’s the right thing to do, and accept that people will not behave as you would have them behave, or you look in the mirror and admit that you’re a heartless monster (to paraphrase Perry), and refrain from do-gooding.

I don’t care how rich you are, Mr Soros. You don’t get to buy slaves anymore.

Read the whole post for context.