Welfare, Cooperation and Rational Thought

I haven't read anything at mises.org about the relationship between welfare, cooperation, and rational thought. It seems to me that the market rewards and strengthens an individual's cooperative spirit. An entrepreneur must cooperate with his suppliers, his customers and his workers or go bankrupt. A worker must cooperate with his employer and his fellow workers at least or be fired.

But welfare strips an individual from the cooperative environment. He has no employer, co-workers or customers he must cooperate with. He simply has to show up in a welfare line to get a check. Therefore the cooperative spirit in welfare recipients is crippled.

Furthermore, as Mises pointed out, socialists can't perform economic calculation. That means welfare recipients, because they cannot calculate their effort compared to their income, are crippled at performing economic calculation. Sure, they're not completely unable to do it - they have to chose between buying food and paying strippers, for example - but they cannot relate either to their production.

These two factors must work together to undermine rational thought in welfare recipients. They're not necessarily more selfish than anybody else. They just can't make rational decisions because their ability to think rationally has been crippled by welfare.

Here's one of those classic arguments against welfare and dependence. It depends of value judgments.

""If you give a man a fish, you feed him for one day. If you teach a man to fish, he can feed himself for life." Yes, there is a whole generation of youngsters who have never heard that old chestnut. This blind spot of ignorance is liberalism, "if you only give a man a single fish, he will have to vote for you to get another fish tomorrow." But this is only half of the formula for successful politics."

All these things make sense from experience and an emotional point of view, but there's no rational explanation of why this occurs. Self-esteem is a real thing, but it's not a rational thing. I make a rational explanation above, and I think that argument should be the rational and compassionate basis, not the sole argument, but the basis, for arguing against welfare. I believe the emotional aspects mentioned above are derived from the rational issues that I mention at the start of this essay.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that welfare also grants the provider power over the receiver, which is another reason government loves welfare. This is why the US government provides welfare to so many Americans. It's why the US government provides "security welfare", NATO, to Europe and so many other countries around the world. It's also another reason why compassionate and rational people should reject welfare.