I agree about bacon, but I disagree about feeling ashamed if one has to take advantage of certain governmental programs for which one has paid, paid, and paid in taxes after years of work.
If taking welfare is a permanent life style, I agree. But, if receiving benefits for which you have paid is a result of unemployment, medical issues, or any number of the nasty vicissitudes of life that are sometimes visited upon us, I see no reason to be ashamed.
But, one must avoid getting trapped on any long term reliance on such programs. You should feel ashamed if you can get off of those programs, but don’t try.
As do I. However, I'm not embarrassed to say that I receive "benefits" from both social security and medicare. I'm not embarrasssed because if I had been allowed to invest the money that was withheld from my and my wife's income for our entire working lives (mid '50's - late '90's) into real estate or the stock market we would probably have earned more income from the money that was withheld than we have thus far received from medicare and SS.
That could and probably will change as I and my wife grow older and our medical expenses increase. OTOH if one or both of us die within a relatively short period of time from now a substantial portion of that paid-in money will go toward paying for someone else's SS payments and medical expenses.
I suppose that if both, or even one of us, live very much longer we could very possibly receive more from those two mandatory programs than we would have earned by investing the money that we paid in. But even so, I still see both SS and medicare as nothing more or less than socialism by other names.
I agree about bacon, but I disagree about feeling ashamed if one has to take advantage of certain governmental programs for which one has paid, paid, and paid in taxes after years of work.
If taking welfare is a permanent life style, I agree. But, if receiving benefits for which you have paid is a result of unemployment, medical issues, or any number of the nasty vicissitudes of life that are sometimes visited upon us, I see no reason to be ashamed.
In this sense, the shame does not mean that we condemn the action as wrong, but that the person’s own conscience knows the action is something not to be proud of, but to be ceased as soon as possible.
Shame, for lack of a better word, is good. (Paraphrasing Gordon Gecko).
If we did not have those programs there would be no reason to tax people to death to fund them.