SCROOGE WAS RIGHT! Libertarian professor tries to defend Ebenezer Scrooge’s miserlyness.
Scrooge is skeptical that many would prefer death to the workhouse, and he is unmoved by talk of the workhouse’s cheerlessness. He is right to be unmoved, for society’s provisions for the poor must be, well, Dickensian. The more pleasant the alternatives to gainful employment, the greater will be the number of people who seek these alternatives, and the fewer there will be who engage in productive labor. If society expects anyone to work, work had better be a lot more attractive than idleness.
Apparently, the professor thinks that people who lose their jobs and can’t find another should have their children taken away from them, just as they did in the workhouses. Hey, if the poor have children they can’t support, what’s it to him? He never forced anyone “to father children he is having difficulty supporting.”
It’s a pathetic display that gets worse as it goes along. Don’t read it. Seriously.
When he testified before Congress regarding Dr. Wertham’s claims about the supposed harmfulness of comics, William Gaines said: “It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid.” I strongly suspect that it would be just as difficult the explain the deep satisfaction of charity to that sad, stunted author of that post.