John Stossel, appearing this morning on "Fox & Friends," with the dufus Steve Doocy: "[W]hen people are needy you want them [to get] help. But think about the [Great] Depression. That was before there was any welfare state at all. How many people starved? No one."
Chimed Doocy, "Right, good point."
Good point? Do these clowns have any idea how utterly asinine that sounds? Raw Story notes "One 1933 study of 514 children in New York [which] found that more than one-third were in 'poor' or 'very poor' health," just as the U.S. Armed Forces soon found that tens of thousands of young American males had grown up so pathetically malnourished they were unfit for military service. Perpetual neglect of its own citizens actually posed a threat to the United States' national security.
Even more asinine was Stossel's confused reference to the Great Depression as a comfy antecedent to the welfare state. The Great Depression created the welfare state. Franklin Roosevelt wasn't just sitting around on his socialist throne one day wondering how he could muck things up for 21st-century libertarians. People were starving, having already lost their jobs and lost their homes and even their hope; traditional sources of charitable relief almost instantly went belly up trying to heal an imploded civilization.
Government, Mr. Stossel, was the only solution. And only idiots don't know that.