Welfare Princelings: Tsarnaev Family Received $100,000 on the Dole

It would be hard to believe, except it's not at all.

The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.

“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” said a person with knowledge of documents handed over to a legislative committee today…

The Herald notes, and AllahPundit underlines, that even Democrats are vowing to be in the forefront of the inquiry to find out how much money went into terrorist pockets.

He also links this old Kausfiles piece about the linkage of welfare and terrorism.

After noting that many 9/11 terrorists enjoyed the generosity of the West's welfare states...

The point isn't simply that many terrorists take advantage of Western welfare states, the same way they take advantage of Western freedoms and Western technology. The point is that extreme anti-social terrorist ideologies (radical Islam, in particular) seem to breed in "oppositional" cultures supported by various government welfare benefits.

...

In fact, there's a good argument that "welfare benefits + ethnic antagonism" is the universal recipe for an underclass with an angry, oppositional culture. The social logic is simple: Ethnic differences make it easy for those outside of, for example, French Arab neighborhoods to discriminate against those inside, and easy for those inside to resent the mainstream culture around them. Meanwhile, relatively generous welfare benefits enable those in the ethnic ghetto to stay there, stay unemployed, and seethe. Without government subsidies, they would have to overcome the prejudice against them and integrate into the mainstream working culture. Work, in this sense, is anti-terrorist medicine. (And if you work all day, there's less time to dream up ways and reasons to kill infidels.)

I think there's a sociological reason at play too. People will find something in their lives that gives them meaning.

For many people, work does give their lives meaning. Few like work, but most understand the accomplishment of standing on one's own feet and providing for oneself (and one's family).

The welfare state may put food in one's mouth, but it does so at the expense at stripping a sense of accomplishment, belonging, and meaning from the recipient. And that void will be filled by something else. While people do not require meaning, as a strict biological matter, as they require food, water, air, and shelter, they do crave it-- it's probably on the level, as far as centrality to one's being, as sex.

posted by Ace at 11:51 AM

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