So... it's like... a job?

Yeah! Kind of like slavery. You work and we will feed you. I think that was tried before and didn't quite pan out.

Let's go for "Job Training" instead. Provide child care for those who qualify as whatever standard society decides should be eligible so they can go to school and become lawyers when they graduate. Then they can become politicians. The same ones that administrate the "job training" program.

OK, I admit, I was a bit over the top there. Not all politicians begin as lawyers, some start as car salesmen. . . ;)

Tommy Thompson, GW Bush's Health and Human Services secretary was Wisconsin's governor prior to being called to Washington. He instituted W2 (Welfare to Work)while governor. It cut the welfare roles significantly. It didn't cut the number of people needing assistance, only the number of people eligible.

Not that I as a taxpayer am complaining about that. It's that I as a public works official have to deal with more people living under my bridges.

I'm all for forced labor for welfare recipients. It's nice to think that most who recieve welfare want to work, but the truth is that the majority doesn't. If forced work wasn't allowed, then forced education or forced job training. Anything that will push people to get off the system. Those who don't work, don't get welfare.

Eliminate welfare and eliminate the monopolies that make work scarce and disfunctional. Start with the land monopoly (see the works of Benjamin Tucker or Henry George).

If you manage to permit businesses to get by their labor problems by forcing poor people to work for wages to low to pay their rent or food bills so they must live crowded five or ten to a room and rely on the emergency room for medical services, you will create a wonderful competition to the illegal immigrants and deprive these people of any opportunity to work, thereby solving that problem. If you can drive the wages even lower to compete with overseas Chinese labor, many jobs may return to the USA. So if we can drive the country to create a miserable sick working class, we can solve a lot of problems. Unfortunately, the cleverest of the poor will quickly find it more profitable to get into better paying illegal activities and it will be a real draw on the economy to build and fill the necessary prisons and sustain the necessary enforcement forces. And the unhealthy poor deprived of proper medical help will form a pool for developing infectious diseases which are no respecter of economic levels. When a really nasty flu virus finally emerges, a very substantial number of peple of all classes will bear the consequences.But if that is the type of society you find preferable, you will have to accept the drawbacks.