Dear Mr. President,

I know you are bent on creating a welfare state.  Let me remind you this is not the American Dream and it never was. 

The American Dream is to be self-sufficient, have freedom, and own property.  The welfare state, much like the Communist state, is diametrically opposed to all of these. 

In a kind of mocking wink at the Real American Dream, your party attempted to help struggling families afford a home for a few months, while nearly destroying the entire American mortgage and financial systems.  What is far worse, however, is the ethical erosion that the welfare state imposes on America.

Every day I see people of all races and cultures having children who can’t take care of them and can’t take care of themselves.  They cannot acquire a well-paying job to support themselves or these children  because they never earned an education (even though at least a high school education is free, and even higher levels of education are widely available to struggling individuals through grants, loans, and the GI bill).

Why didn’t they get an education?  Because they do not value an education.  Why don’t they value education?  Because they know the government, through welfare and other programs, will take care of them. 

Welfare leads to ignorance which leads to more welfare.

Perhaps you don’t know this because you have never lived with or experienced some of the darker aspects of the welfare state.  I do know this, not because of Republican talking points or Conservative talk radio, but because I have seen it with my own eyes, over and over again, when I lived around many welfare recipients.  I have also seen this time and time again at the alternative school where I work.

Welfare is good when it supports the aged or the handicapped, the people who truly and physically cannot care for themselves.  But when welfare is extended to anyone who feels entitled to it, it becomes a trap that destroys ambition, wonder, initiative, desire for education, self-sufficiency, and independence. 

Only through struggle and hardship may a person sharpen and strengthen themselves to become free, disciplined, and strong in spirit.  When a person is coddled by a “nanny” state of welfare programs from birth to death, individual opportunity and enterprise are crushed, then there is no incentive for self-sufficiency, for the creation of opportunity, for the glories of education, for the thirst of freedom.  These things are destroyed when people are handed everything they physically crave and do not have to struggle or work for them.  The eyes grow dim and hollow, the bowl goes out for government handouts, and the spirit dies.