This is painful for a liberal to admit, but conservatives have a point when they suggest that America’s safety net can sometimes entangle people in a soul-crushing dependency.
The NYT looks at a literacy program in Appalachian country wherein students are being removed because parents worry about the affect it will have on their government handout.
This is what poverty sometimes looks like in America: parents here in Appalachian hill country pulling their children out of literacy classes. Moms and dads fear that if kids learn to read, they are less likely to qualify for a monthly check for having an intellectual disability.
[…]
“The kids get taken out of the program because the parents are going to lose the check,” said Billie Oaks, who runs a literacy program here in Breathitt County, a poor part of Kentucky. “It’s heartbreaking.”
But why would the liberal NYT have concern over this? After all, it is the hope and dream fully realized of the progressive ideology: in exchange for a bit of freedom, the government will care for you with pittance. Comfortable slavery. Content mediocrity. The American dream spring from ambition and motivation, neither of which are found in the community noted in the story.
The liberal mindset in the article isn’t fully ready to release the idea that government as the steward of man is the best scenario. They spend paragraphs here and there grabbing on to whatever weak reed is nearby as a way to justify holding on to a dead ideal.
However, the ground given in this admission won’t be regained.
