From the UK Daily Mail comes a story of generational government dependence. The article features a picture showing three generations of people living off the livelihood of others.
All ten members of the clan share a council house and live off benefits amounting to around £32,000 a year. And very happy they are, too.
Matriarch is grandmother Sue McFadden, 54. "Our neighbours are so snobby - they call us the "Shameless" family and say that we ought to go out to work. But how can we work when we have all these children to look after?
They make about 32,000 pounds for doing nothing; for Americans, that's over $63,000 a year for doing nothing!
But somehow, that just isn't enough for this family of professional leeches.
"The only problem is," she says without a hint of irony, "that we're living in a three-bedroom council house, which is ridiculous.
"I'm asking the council for a ten-bedroom home for all of us. We need more space. It's awful sometimes when all the children are squabbling. Still, we do have a big TV with Sky, but we need some relaxation."
Of course they do, poor lambs. What a damning verdict on our claim-it-all society, a grotesque mirror of the dark television drama Shameless. That show features fictional father-of-eight Frank, who is work-shy and self-pitying. Living on the Chatsworth Estate, he heads a family of dysfunctional teenagers living on an estate of benefit claimants and cheats.
In case you're wondering what a "council house" is, it's government housing, supplied by the town council, the local-level governing body in Britain. (I lived in England for three years).
Think this family is an isolated case?
Six million Britons are living in homes where no one has a job and "benefits are a way of life", according to a report by MPs. Shock figures also revealed that 20,000 households in Britain are pocketing more than £30,000 a year in state benefits.
With thousands of children growing up in families where their parents and grandparents have never worked, a senior government adviser warned this week of a "terrible legacy" of youngsters who had no expectation of ever getting a job.
Sue herself is defiant. "People don't understand how hard it is to keep a family like this going - no wonder we can't work. How could I go out to work with all these children at home? Local people call us scroungers and that is so unfair. We need the money to keep the family going.
Thankfully, we made some progress in stepping back from this kind of stuff when Republicans pushed through welfare reform in 199-1996. But we didn't go nearly far enough, and liberals are always pushing to get us back to where we were before and beyond again.
There are folks like this in America, where generational government dependence is the norm. I know a few, and one is in my extended family.
We--and the Brits--need to return to a system of private charity. Private charity helps foster a greater accountability because, unlike government institutions, private charities are usually close enough to the recipients that they can better determine actual need.
When we enable dependence and a lack of work ethic, we not only rob from productive citizens, we enable this kind of behavior to continue, and we erode human dignity in the process.
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