'Mountain Pride' versus the Welfare State

By John Bennett

The federal government is choking our economy while it degrades the character of a proud people. The food stamp program is purposefully undermining "mountain pride" in Appalachian communities in order to create more wards of the welfare state. It should be a scandal that the federal government is purposefully weakening a core principle of our value system: self-reliance. To wit, the feds are praising local bureaucrats for "counteracting" what they call "mountain pride." These bureaucrats are convincing people who characteristically reject food stamps to instead embrace a culture of dependence. The full context of those remarks highlights the sordid behavior of our welfare state. The federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program has an award called the Hunger Champions Awards. One of the winners of 2011's award was the Social Services department in Ashe County, North Carolina. Their accomplishment: an outreach worker found a new way to convince people to take government handouts, even though those people had decided earlier that they wouldn't request the handouts: Hearing from the outreach worker that.... (Read Full Article)