Social Insurance "Weakened us as a People"

Since their agenda to dismantle the two most popular government programs in existance is extremely unpopular, most conservatives are smart enough to lie and keep their actual beliefs to themselves.

Marco Rubio apparently didn't get that memo:

With a tone that suggested he spoke more in sorrow than in anger, Rubio said that though the creation of a welfare state "was well-intentioned, it was doomed to fail from the start."

"These programs actually weakened us as a people. You see, almost forever, it was institutions in society that assumed the role of taking care of one another. If someone was sick in your family, you took care of them. If a neighbor met misfortune, you took care of them. You saved for your retirement and your future because you had to. We took these things upon ourselves in our communities, our families, and our homes, and our churches and our synagogues. But all that changed when the government began to assume those responsibilities."

Of course, one might argue that the reason welfare programs were created -- with great popular demand -- was precisely because in all too many cases "communities," "families," and "churches" weren't doing an adequate job.

For starters, Rubio's vision of America where people care for each other and think things other than themselves and amassing sounds a wee bit different than the Galtian paradise that his followers seem to endorse.

But putting that aside, does anyone think that people care for each other less than they did before the time of big government when women and non-white people knew their place? I don't. In fact these days I feel like quite a few people depend more on their church's food bank, live in the house of a family member, or some use form of community assistance more than they did a few years ago.

Why is that?

Well, this thing happened where the masters of the universe crashed our economy without asking us first. Tons of people lost their jobs and houses through absolutely no fault of their own.

So how exactly does this mean Social Security and Medicare "weakened" us as a people? Honestly I don't know, but the last few years seems to be a reminder exactly why we have these programs, rather than an excuse to destroy them.