Musings on Dickens and Scrooge
Posted By matt on November 29, 2005
Charles Dickens was a dirty hippie.
The only thing I don't like about Scrooge is the fact that he treats his workers like crap. Bob Cratchit is underpaid and he doesn't give people time off.
Aside from that, I don't have a problem with him. Yes, we pay taxes to support the poor. Why then, are we expected to give more money around the holidays? Stop taxing me, and I'll give more to charity which can help the poor more effectively than government. Plus private charity can screen out the people who are poor because of bad decisions and help the people who are there because of bad fortune, or attach conditions which require the poor to actually take steps to alleviate their poverty. The government dole can't attach conditions (wouldn't be politically correct, you know), so we just keep paying and paying and paying.
Dickens basically makes anyone who has money out to be an evil, greedy man. People who own businesses make money, sure, but that doesn't make them evil. They take the risks, they realize the rewards. Their businesses provide jobs.
Specifically talking about Scrooge, Dickens paints him as a bad man for evicting people who cannot pay the rent/mortgage. Well, what do you expect him to do? Allow people to live without paying rent? Then what's their incentive to actually pay you?
Maybe I'm just getting old, or maybe I'm just tired of the welfare state making people feel entitled to something which they didn't earn; like people who do work for their money somehow owe them something.
Any type of welfare state is unjust to the productive individuals who are forced to finance it. Perhaps equally bad, however, is the horrible harm it perpetuates on the poor. Poverty is not like an incurable disease. It is a problem that is resolved by full-time employment. But the poor individial must be willing to examine and change the destructive values that underlie and give rise to his poverty. In some terms, if only implicitly, he must grasp both the nature of selfishness and the role of the mind, if he is to achieve prosperity and happiness. The welfare state militates against such understanding and supports his most irrational preimises. This is one of the most important reasons why it must be eliminated.”
- Bernstein, Andrew, “The Welfare State Versus Values and the Mind,” The Intellectual Activist, October 2001, p.22, as quoted by Elder, Larry, “Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies, and The Special Interests that Divide America”, 2002, p.287
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