Nature hates duplication!!! There are endless proofs of this. Several come to mind;1) When a broken bone is set in a splint or cast to get it to heal, it DOES heal, usually, but when the cast or splint comes off, it is seen that the limb thus supported has lost significant muscle mass and strength, because the cast was supporting the limb in position and the muscles, no longer needed in that role,and not being exercised, either, began to disappear. 2) When we begin habitually nagging at ANYONE, we find that we must do it more and more,because, as we act as a “crank”, the person’s “self-starter” erodes and disappears.
A wise application of this would be that we should generally avoid doing things for people-friends,our children, coworkers, family, relatives, the poor, ANYONE, that they could do for themselves. People who are in the helping professions learn this, and the rest of us need to learn it, too. The more we do for other people unneccessarily, the more helpless they become. That is why the welfare system is so bad.Otherwise able-bodied, mentally normal people who find that they can get enough food, adequate shelter, and pocket money from the government, in return for just filling out the proper forms and submitting proof of poverty,will eventually lose their drive to earn those things on their own, it’s simply “nature hates duplication” in human form. If the government is doing the worrying about physically supporting Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones can worry about other things. It becomes, eventually, that horror known as “learned helplessness”, where people become convinced that they can’t take care of themselves, and need the government to support them, or they will quite literally lose their home, starve and die. This is the aim of socialism, it seems, in America and elsewhere.Just convince American employees that they are incapable of planning adequately for retirement and so the government will “give” them Social Security, and they will not even try to save anything towards retirement (”I am entitled to Social Security, after all”). Then, later, when anyone whispers that the SS program cannot survive in its current form for too much longer, hear the screams of the retired and nearly retired, terrified that they will starve and die if the program is scrapped, or even altered in any way. They will feel compelled by their fear to vote for whatever politician or administration will protect them from the heartless people who want to change things and kill them. Politicians are aware of this, and the Democrat ones tend to be the ones who keep peddling the “you vote for me, and I’ll take care of you, poor thing” pablum. Selling fear and helplessness, and being reelected for it
Social Security,Medicare, socialism and the welfare system have also weakened families wherever they have been tried. Remember, nature hates duplication! For much of human history, families,all over the world, in countless cultures, while imperfect, have tended toward caring for their own elderly family members,and to their sick ones. In America, for many years, people who could afford to (there were many, even in the middle class) had houses built with room for the extended family to live together, with several generations under one roof, children being raised around old people, all generations benefitting. Single family houses boomed after WWII, though, and”old folks homes” proliferated, and it became first possible (the government chipped in), then socially acceptable, to shuffle off the grandparents to the local warehouse for the no-longer-young-and-able and abandon them to “expert professional care”. With their Social Security checks, they didn’t need the kids’ money, and eventually retirement villages sprang up, where children aren’t even allowed, except as visitors, and grandparents can “live independently”, supported by government benefits, paid for by strangers, instead of by their children. So it is here. In France, the old, supported by government largesse, are so thoroughly abandoned by their families that thousands of old French died in a heat wave there several years ago. The heat wave hit during the national month of vacation, and the adult childen couldn’t be bothered to interrupt their family vacation long enough to check their old parents and be sure they were OK. The government was supposed to do that, too, presumably.
The way to strength is to AVOID this duplication, and help people understand that they CAN support themselves, now and later, they don’t NEED government programs, that the government can only give away the money it gets from EVERYONE ELSE, and that the more we do OURSELVES, the happier and richer we make ourselves.
This is NOT to say that we should NEVER help others, but we do need the wisdom to help them ONLY with the things they CANNOT do or get for themselves, and leave them the dignity of providing for THEMSELVES whatever they can.
