The employed are drug tested, how about the unemployed?

This is from an email that is being passed around the information superhighway:

Now I'd suggest enforcing this after some period, maybe after 3 months of welfare but I am a little bit on the compassionate side.

 

Personally I'm for not taking a test if you have a job, as far as being on state aid I could see a test there. However what are we prepared to do when those who use drugs fail? Leave them with nothing, to die, to steal, to self explode?

Perhaps forced counseling would be best, phased infraction systems, etc.

 

People on hard drugs and collecting welfare is a big issue. There is no way that children raised in this kind of environment go on to led productive lives.

 

Ahh but what is the solution?
Throwing them off welfare, locking them up and taking the kids away..

Or forcing them to counseling, getting a job and an infraction based system to keep them on the right track?

 

First you have to identify the problem. Solutions aren't easy. Both the carrot and the stick is needed.

 

The email smells like class warfare to me.

I don't think it is good to treat welfare recipients like government employees. It creates a pseudo-slave master relationship between the people on welfare, and the productive/political class. We're already seeing this happen in private prisons.

2 obvious problems from what I can see.

Drugs should be decriminalized.

Welfare should be abolished.

 

If welfare recipients don't like it they can always find employment. Accepting the money creates obligations from the recipients.

 

It shouldn't. Government policy like minimum wage legislation creates unemployment.

Again, by proposing that they have obligations, implies that the welfare creates servitude.

A lot easier to remove welfare, and let private charity decide who it helps and how much.

 

Class warfare? Are you stereotyping the lower classes as being unemployed drug takers? I don't see what class has to do with this.

Why should people who go to work all day long have to pay for people who sit at home and do drugs. Why are unemployed people allowed to do drugs if employed people aren't. Either stop testing employed people or make it fair and require everyone to do one.

 

Technically nobody is allowed to do illegal drugs.
Not everyone is tested at the workplace either

 

The obligation is to get off welfare and look for a job.

How do you expect a welfare mother to raise her children when she's home all day shooting up or hitting a crack pipe? Even selling the food that are supposed to feed her children to buy drugs.

 

Yes, I am stereotyping the lower classes. And the working class. And that they are being pitted against one another, with the argument being,

"If we have to work, and can't smoke dope, then you can't smoke dope either"

instead of looking at it rationally, as

Everyone work. Smoke dope if you want to.

 

Everybody should work if there was enough work to go around - for decades capitalism has been unable to supply full employment to Western economies.

And the work that does exist is often of a short-term, casual nature - 1/3 of Londoners are on short-term contracts, which creates gaps in-between employment.

Anyway, what's all this drug testing at work business?

Is this big in America?

Over here, train drivers and tube workers are tested for drugs, but I don't think any other sector of the workforce is...

 

Drug testing the unemployed would not only stink of "police state" but would further degrade people who don't like claiming benefits in the first place, but have no other option.

Not all unemployed people are users in both senses of the word.

 

Times are getting tough. Drug testing is required in the military. Why shouldn't people that want benefits for not working take a drug test?

 

This is one of the greatest fallacies every spread by propaganda.

Socialism is the only system which can create full employment. In fact, with the conditions in this thread, we could do it by changing welfare check to paycheck. Bingo, full or relatively full unemployment.

Capitalism doesn't fail. Markets have failures, more often than not brought on by intervention, but capitalism itself is merely private (instead of state) ownership of profits. And when people have personal ownership of profits, they have an incentive to invent things, work more, accumulate wealth.

You don't have to look much further than all of the eastern Europeans countries when communism collapsed, and how environmentally trashed they were under communal ownership. How their equipment was run down (no capital re-investment) and their technology outdated.

 

Indeed but does that justify people on benefit have to be degraded further?

I should hope so they play will dangerous toys including multi-millionaire dollar equipment.

Why shouldn’t everyone be made to come in to some centre every Saturday to be tested? It would achieve much more than just testing those who are employed or unemployed, it would even check those who are self-employed too.

 

I think Toopac and I are on the same page. No one wants to be in a snitch society, where the government, which is mostly composed of the most privately inept people, testing, poking and prodding us.

 

The self employed don't get a check for not working.

 

But they do receive some sort of government subsidy, whether for health costs, or education costs or national defense costs.

You could apply the same principle.

Never, ever, ever endorse a government discriminating against it's own citizens. That leads to all sorts of ugliness.