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You are (deliberately or not) putting out the classic Marxist argument which confuses "equality of rights" (ie, a poor man having the same protection against violence and fraud by a rich man, as vice-versa) with "equality of condition" (if someone has less than average, the State may forcibly take away stuff from someone who has more than average). The former creates peace, prosperity, and security. The latter creates poverty and death wherever it is tried.

No, I'm not confusing the two. With regard to taxes going to welfare AT ALL, is not taxation without representation because we as a body of voters have voted to fund welfare! If we want, we can vote NOT to fund welfare. That would be equally valid under our system of government. But this was not the original discussion we were having.

The original discussion was WHO is responsible for kids created. You seemed to think it was only the mother and that the mother and children should suffer the consequences with no help either from welfare or the support of the father. This is a fundemental flaw in the concept of "personal responsibility". It weakens the whole case. Either every individual is responsible for his/her actions and their consequences, or no one is. Fish or cut bait.

As well, the concept of unilataral responsibility for children has NEVER WORKED. Absolutely never. The result of large numbers of fathers abandoning their obligations to their young has been infanticide, abortion and of course extreme poverty which leads to illiteracy, drugs, crime, basicaly the breakdown of the entire social order.... and the cycle continues to the next generation.

Note: I'm not saying women are blameless. Absolutely not. What I'm saying is the problem is complex and involves BOTH parties to irresponsible, unsustainable child creation. It can only be unraveled and solved by holding both parties responsible for their conduct and its consequences.

So, whether we keep the welfare system or not, we still face the same problems. How to end this cycle? In my personal opinion (and reluctantly believe me) we need to keep welfare because it buys all of us a measure of safety and a more civil life. I wish we didn't have to ante up to live in a civil decent society, but IMO we do. It is part of the "infrastructure" cost if you will for the high standard of life most of us want. The alternatives to not paying are just plain lousy.

If I could, my first choice would be to somehow make both parents meet their obligations to their kids, not welfare, or as little welfare as possible. I'd like to see us move in that direction. To do that we have to rebuild our entire culture to one which harps on "personal responsibility" of parents to the children they co-create. Actually personal responsibility in all realms.

The original discussion was WHO is responsible for kids created. You seemed to think it was only the mother and that the mother and children should suffer the consequences with no help either from welfare or the support of the father. This is a fundemental flaw in the concept of "personal responsibility". It weakens the whole case. Either every individual is responsible for his/her actions and their consequences, or no one is. Fish or cut bait.

My original point was that women bear some responsibility for who they choose to conceive children with. I agree that a husband and father has a responsibility to his kids. This has been the pattern in US society up until around the 1960's.

Prior to the 1960's, a husbandless mother with young kids would rely on relatives, her church, or private charity to help out. The consequences of husbandless parenting were sufficiently bad that women were more selective in who they had kids by, and tended to get married. This kept the level of illegitimacy sufficiently low that husbandless women COULD be supported by their families (since there would be at most one woman in the extended family at any point in time) without creating hardship for the extended family

Then welfare came along. Low-income men discovered that welfare benefits added up to more than they could contribute to a family from a minimum-wage job, and the result was an explosion in illegitimacy

No, I'm not confusing the two. With regard to taxes going to welfare AT ALL, is not taxation without representation because we as a body of voters have voted to fund welfare!

If I could convince a majority of voters to send you to the gas chambers, would you go along with that as proper, since we as a body have voted for it? How about re-instituting slavery? That had the support of the majority of the voting population in the US at one time.

Read again what I wrote in #37. You ARE confusing the two. "Equality of rights" means that what is legal for A is also legal for B, and what's illegal for A is also illegal for B. "Equality of condition" means that if A is economicly worse off than B, then it is legitimate to take away some of B's stuff without B's consent and give it to A. I support the former. The latter is the classic Marxist viewpoint, which I reject

You keep saying that we would have a horrible situation without AFDC and the rest of the Welfare State. Prior to the 1960's we did not have AFDC, and we did not have a horrible situation.