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If ever a comment warranted "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" it's this. "High Trust Societies" only exist at small scale; a tribe, maybe a smallish vilage, where everyone knows everyone, and has known everyone for generations, can do this, and even then, there have always been freeloaders (or suspected freeloaders). At scale, even at the city level, this has never happened, and I have no clue how you believe America as a country once had federal welfare programs that didn't have fraud, waste, and abuse; maybe in the brief moment after the ink was dry on the legislation that created a given program but before the first checks went sent, there hadn't yet been abuse of the program, but claiming we - or any other country, for that matter - once had welfare programs but not absurd abuse simply flies in the face of reality.
I don’t view this as an “extraordinary claim”. Something changed in America and we have 2 Americas. My dad was an alcoholic and my mom worked about 70 hours a week. She made 30k a year. I’ve had a job since I was 12 years old. This is normal to me. I guess we should have had food stamps? Back then there was social stigma at being on assistance.
America culture has changed. Which I am willing to concede. But it’s not an extraordinary claim especially if you’ve lived outside of blue belts. It’s how things were.
I feel like “old man yells at clouds”. But Anglo culture was different.
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