Government Largess Breeds Irresponsible Largeness
People who, like myself, have lived for extended periods in socialists countries can try to explain to other Americans the insanity rampant in such a society, but without current, documented examples, I fear many Americans just don’t believe us. They think we’re making it up, or that we’re exaggerating. I assure you we are not, and this article from the British Daily Mail illustrates it.
A 25-year old woman who has never worked a day in her life but receives £600 (or about $1,000) a month and was given a $13,000 gastric operation (on the taxpayer’s dime also) is now whining that because she lost 224 pounds (as the surgery was intended to do), her government Sugar Daddy is reducing her allowance by about $560 a month. Poor thing.
Let’s see what the Daily Mail has to say:
Laura Ripley, who has never worked, was given the operation on the NHS to help her slim down from 38 to 22 stone.
But the 25-year-old, who receives £600 a month in benefits, is unhappy because as a result of losing weight she can no longer claim disability allowance amounting to an extra £340 a month.
This, she says, means she cannot afford to eat healthily – causing her to pile the weight back on.
‘I can’t afford to buy WeightWatchers crisps and cereal bars any more so I eat Tesco’s chocolate bars and packets of Space Invaders crisps, sometimes four of each a day’, says Laura, who spends seven hours a day watching TV.
‘People ask why I don’t snack on an apple – they’re cheap, but emotionally I don’t always feel like an apple.’
The disability allowance money she used to receive was spent on gym workouts, healthy food and having her hair highlighted.
She adds: ‘Without my disability allowance I’m left with just £210 incapacity benefit which I get because of my depression, and £100 income support I receive every two weeks and out of that I have to give them back £70 towards the cost of the £500-a-month flat I’m living in.’
Since the extra allowance stopped Laura has put on a stone in just three weeks and claims she is being treated unfairly.
Emotionally she sometimes just doesn’t “feel like an apple.”
Oh my goodness! Being responsible for yourself is so depressing, isn’t it?
And they’re even talking about bilking the taxpayers another $19,000 for yet another weight-related surgery.
The taxpayers of Great Britain (i.e. those who are working and being responsible for themselves) are so unfair to her, aren’t they? They’ve given her $1,000 or more every month of her adult life, paid for a $13,000 operation for her, and now they expect her to actually do something for herself. How cruel! What monsters!
Meanwhile, the blind, deaf and dumb (dumb intellectually; they are actually quite vocal) here in America can’t wait to take us headlong down the same dead-end path of irresponsibility, waste and insanity by pushing government health care and every other socialist piece of garbage they can think of.
In a free and free-market system such as we used to have here in the United States, it’s your business how fat or fit you are, and you get to pay the bills for either behavior. Under socialism, the government gets to tell you how to live, and the taxpayers get stuck with the bill when you don’t obey their lordships. And the more socialism you get, the worse the abuse of freedoms and abuse of the taxpayers gets.
One might (might) excuse the British just a bit for getting into this folly in the first place. After all, they don’t have a Constitution like ours which prohibits big government and socialized medicine.
Here in the United States, with examples like Britain, Canada, Sweden, the former Soviet Union, et al, we have no such excuse.
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