>>It hurts to work all day to pay for stuff, only to come home to half your neighbors lazing about drunk and stoned getting a free ride. It fucking sucks, I could never escape the thought that I could just quit my job and smoke weed all day and live pretty much the same as I was.
I know people who work back breaking low-income jobs and get very angry seeing people on government assistance sitting around all day getting high with their friends.
I think the position of the homeless activists: of giving people with no life skills and no discipline, and who habitually abuse drugs, no-strings-attached taxpayer aid, is totally immoral and irresponsible. It's the worse example of short-sighted unthinking compassion and/or virtue-signalling.
At the very least, drug addicts who've lost the ability to support themselves should be committed to a drug rehab center. In the past the lost souls were also enrolled in work houses. Those on public aid doing some work should be another minimum requirement for any welfare system. The nature of the work can be targeted to their intellectual and physical capabilities, but they should be required to do some kind of work if they're going to receive public support.
Anyway, demanding accountability from welfare recipients is not going to win you any elections - people would rather elect someone with compassion and a terrible plan for governance than elect someone with a logically coherent governance plan who might not have compassion - so the problem will just get worse.
The desire to quit can be shaped by the incentives society creates. If using drugs and partying with fellow drug-using friends means continually being committed to three month stints in rehab, it might encourage that party to get out of that lifestyle.
Also, some people may decide to quit once they've been forced to stop doing drugs for a few months, because it results in lessened chemical dependency, and some time for the parts of their brain damaged from the drug-use to recover, which helps increase self-control.
We forcibly prevent children from engaging in self-destructive behaviour, because sometimes they need someone who knows better to control them, until they mature and do know better. Just because someone turns 18, doesn't always mean this stops applying. In the case of someone habitually using hard drugs, I think a strong argument can be made that it still applies because they lack the maturity and self-control to make these decisions for themselves.
I know people who work back breaking low-income jobs and get very angry seeing people on government assistance sitting around all day getting high with their friends.
I think the position of the homeless activists: of giving people with no life skills and no discipline, and who habitually abuse drugs, no-strings-attached taxpayer aid, is totally immoral and irresponsible. It's the worse example of short-sighted unthinking compassion and/or virtue-signalling.
At the very least, drug addicts who've lost the ability to support themselves should be committed to a drug rehab center. In the past the lost souls were also enrolled in work houses. Those on public aid doing some work should be another minimum requirement for any welfare system. The nature of the work can be targeted to their intellectual and physical capabilities, but they should be required to do some kind of work if they're going to receive public support.
Anyway, demanding accountability from welfare recipients is not going to win you any elections - people would rather elect someone with compassion and a terrible plan for governance than elect someone with a logically coherent governance plan who might not have compassion - so the problem will just get worse.