As true as it is that some people are incapable of valuing things they have not paid the price for, the fact is that free money is never free. There is terrible cost for being on the public dole, that is immediately evident when you walk into a welfare community.

Being on public assistance or living on a reservation, the cost of that free income or housing is having to live in poverty. It provides just enough to survive but not enough to advance. While many assistance programs include job training and placement programs, the jobs one can qualify for rarely provide better incomes.

Taken in the context of the way people on state or federal assistance are forced to jump through hoops just to get food, clothing, housing or basic medical services, it is hard to imagine a more discouraging or disheartening life style.

People who are subjected to this tend to have little appreciation for the system that provides for them (the rest of society for the most part) because the system has no appreciation for them. Part of this comes from having someone else decide which of their needs deserve to be met, or what sort of help they deserve to get.

To simply exist in the world requires more time and resources than an individual can provide for themselves. It simply is not possible to advance if you can not start out on an even footing with the rest of the world, and people in poverty rarely do.

The best that most impoverished families can do is work twice as hard as everyone else for half as much in the hope of giving their children the opportunities they never had. No one can choose what family, race, community, culture or nation to be born into, or the advantages and disadvantages that they have as an accident of birth.

It’s human nature to say that “no child shall be left behind” but in reality some children get born with one hell of a head start. Just knowing you got dealt a bad hand in life is enough to make you pretty unhappy, but when you also realize that the deck was stacked against you that unhappiness can become something much uglier.

Poverty is the direct consequence of the creation and accumulation of wealth. Poverty is symptom of a disease that infects civilization.

It is natural to assume that the disease is greed, but let’s be honest, its only human to want more than we need. The problem is that some people are ruthless enough to simply take whatever they want.

A certain pair of continents come to mind as examples.

Diagnosed correctly, poverty is a disease that takes root in the most privileged and compels them to inflict the conditions that manifest as poverty upon society.

It drives them to amass even greater wealth and privilege, defensively, at the cost of their victims. Until civilization can overcome this disease it will continue to be sick.

And more than a bit deranged.

I would also like to point out that, while there are semantic differences between “criminals” and “rebels” the defining characteristic of any society’s ne’er-do-wells is that they are usually its victims.

Allowing for the complexity of human beings, and the possibility of other contributing factors, people who suffer, end up feeling that they are not properly represented.

That they are not fairly established in society. That they pay a higher cost for less of the benefits of their participation. They lose respect for the establishments of society.

So, it is not necessary to be in poverty to be a criminal, or a terrorist, or what have you. But being in poverty puts you a lot closer to the fringe of society where you have more to gain by bucking the system than you do by taking part.

As long as there are people out there who have better prospects working against society, there will be people content to exploit or disrupt it.

The parasitic element of our society is created by our own institutions, in the way they are organized, the way the operate, and the way they perpetuate imbalances in the status quo.

To see who is at fault, you simply look at who benefits from the status quo the most consistently. Crime and welfare have been accepted by those people as an acceptable operational reality of industry, economics and politics.

The first question everyone needs to ask is, “who has the right to determine privilege?” Privilege is certainly not distributed based on who does the most work, or even who does the most important work. In both cases, the poor do.

To understand how important the working poor are, try to imagine what would happen to civilization if they all stopped doing their jobs!

Granted, there are some very specialized fields that have great value, and the individuals who perform those functions are handsomely rewarded, but it does not always follow that a highly valued worker does the most important work.

Any job can become “worthless” if enough people are skilled at doing it - that’s simple “supply and demand” and it applies to general labor or brain surgery.

Teachers, who perform an essential social function, are valued proportionately to the perceived value or significance of the students they instruct.

Yes, other factors like tenure and experience apply, but a gifted grade-school teacher is easily overlooked in favor of a competent tenured professor at an elite university.

Which brings up the second question everyone needs to ask, “who has the right to determine the value of my contribution to society?”

The answer to both of the questions raised should be “Me.”

Any other answer ought to show you what’s wrong with the system. Beyond the most basic necessities, “chasing the dollar” is a very unfulfilling way to spend life.

With so much emphasis on making money, particularly in business, it becomes too easy to lose sight of why we are working in the first place. Most people accept the argument that money is superior to barter, but both systems of exchange are dependent upon assigning a fair value to the production of goods and services.

The value of the dollar fluctuates, and over the past hundred years has plummeted through inflation, but the cost of an hour’s work is still an hour spent working. The true value is in what is accomplished, and how hard it is to accomplish - and only the person doing the work knows that!

The day people stopped setting the value of their own work was the day that people lost their independence and freedom. When there is always someone else deciding the value of your work and your worth in the community, what assurance is there that the decision will be fair?

Living is the only privilege we truly have, and we have the responsibility of making our own contribution to the world valuable. Anything that distorts or denies that is part of the problem.

If you want more in life, you have to be more, you have to do more; you can’t just keep doing the same thing you have been doing all along.

You are going to have to do something you don’t want to do - because if you wanted to do it, you would have already tried.

But, you can never know if you’ll like doing something until you try, and in some cases until you succeed.

This is all common sense stuff, but it’s amazing how easy it is for people to avoid even thinking these simple thoughts when they need to, or taking it to heart. And really, all the good advice in the world is worthless if a person is not listening, and it can’t be used unless a person can take it upon themselves to use it.

Life really does not have a purpose if you don’t live your life on purpose. People really do a lot better in the world when they act like they have a good reason for being here. Blissful ignorance of the world is a handicap, however pleasant it might seem.

An open mind should always be guarded by open eyes.