Last week, I spoke to a Filipino medic who had spent several months
in the UK. At first he was highly impressed by what he found; he
thought he had encountered a higher civilisation. No one went hungry,
no one was abandoned to his fate, everyone was treated to the best of
the doctor's abilities. No distress, however caused, failed to evoke
any attemtpt to relieve it.
'If only we could have your welfare system,' he said.
Some months later, his views had altered considerably. He had noticed
a strange indefinable malaise among many of the Brits he. Although
fortunate by the standards of Manila slum-dwellers, they lacked life
and spirit. They were bored and malcontent, and yet apparently
unwilling to do anything to alleviate their situation. It did not
take him long to make a connection between this state of suspended
but disgruntled animation and the welfare system which, initially, he
had thought so humane.
The idea behind giving people welfare is noble. It was too alleviate
the dire social and economic conditions countries like America,
Britian and Germany found themselves in during the 1930s. And who
would wish for a return to 1930s style unemployment and depression?
But the fact is welfare undermines notions of self-respect and over
time cultivates a social pathology which in America ultimately
required zero tolerance to even begin to turn back the tide of anti-
social behaviour on the streets of large American cities.
Undoubtedly, there are those posters who will flick through their
college books on liberal social studies courses and insist that there
is a statistical relationship between poverty and crime. In fact, the
explosion of crime in countries as diverse as Brazil and the UK is
soley down to a weakening of law and order and ineffective courts
which give sentences that are too lenient.
What the Filipnions do not need is yet more welfare and charity from
those who insist that all Westerners in the Philippines have "excess
finances". I am sure there are many here who go to the Philippines
with no more than a pension and some savings to live on. If so, do
not allow the liberals here to persuade you that you are obligated to
give, give and give again. Do not let them persuade you that to judge
people as unworthy of your help is a sin - to give money to an idle
man is to encourage him in his idleness just as to give money to the
drunk is simply to prolong his dependence on alcohol. Above all,
insist that if you do give money it is spent on something useful or
worthwhile and that it is for the highest good of all concerned.
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