alphafemale:
There is a certain satisfaction in earning ones own living.
There's also a certain satisfaction in getting one over on someone else. You may perhaps have too much dignity to feel smug that someone gave you a free house but many people would be delighted and indeed, think they deserved it. Often, poor people genuinely think they deserve to be given handouts because they see people with more money and don't understand how they got it.
That some people are unable to is an indictment against society, not the individual.
Perhaps, but the fact that some people are unwilling to work is an indictment against the individual. A society that rewards people for not working certainly has problems so it's not entirely fair to blame the Gillespies. The socialist culture that gives them their sense of entitlement is indeed also to blame.
There are too many unscrupulous "entrepreneurs" and 'fat cat business men who will get other people working for them and pay little or nothing in return for hard physical graft.
But how can they do that? My ability to work is worth a certain amount of money to someone. I will do my best to get as much money in exchange for my work as I can. My employers will try to get as much work from me for as little money as they can. If we can find a level at which we agree, then we both win. If not we both go our separate ways and find a more suitable candidate for trade.
As for the huge pay gap you try to justify, no one, no matter how skilled or qualified they are is worth the enormous wages some people 'earn' but everyone should have a chance to earn a living wage.
Again, what a particular product or service is worth is determined only by how much someone is willing to pay for it. You can demand £20 an hour for your ability to clean toilets but you can't force someone to pay you that much. The great thing about this is that everyone does have a chance to earn a living wage. There is nothing stopping the Gillespies from earning enough to keep them. The problem is that they had more children than they could afford and expect somebody else to foot the bill.
The article showed that Mr Gillespie would have worked if he could have earned a living wage to support his family.
No, it showed that he would have worked if the handouts he was receiving weren't worth more. I don't entirely blame him for not taking the job. I blame the government for rewarding him for not working.
How do you know that those children will never learn to pay for themselves?
They might but why would they? They see that their family is better off than they have any right to be, and that if their parents worked for a living they wouldn't be so well off. They are unlikely to receive a university education and so are likely to earn less than average throughout their lives. Even if they differ from their parents in finding unemployment satisfying, they will realise that in the society in which they live, they will be rewarded for scrounging and punished for working.
They certainly have more chance to make something of themselves now, given a decent environment than they would if they were forced to live in the poverty and squalor some people here seem to think they deserve.
I disagree. There's nothing like hardship to promote ambition.
As for irresponsibility, I say that the very act of publicizing this family's stuation is irresponsible. What does the Daily Mail think will happen to those children when they go back to school after the holidays I wonder?
Nothing, of course. Why would anything happen to them? Wouldn't most sensible people agree with you that these people are not in fact scroungers but that we should be happy to go without luxuries so that they can have them? Or do you think some people will disagree with that?