I loan this space to the eminent Biologist Hertrude Gimmelfarb from the Ilse of Langerhans

I wish to write about the origin of the modern welfare state so that people who are so recklessly dismantling it can understand the admirable heroes who created it first of all Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was anything but an ideologue and, when he invented social security he didn't aim to transform humanity. That is he was as far from Lenin as he was from scrooge rejecting both the communist dream of making a new man and the sadistic eagerness to humiliate poor people in the name of incentives.

Instead his simple genius was to note "The very rich, like you and me, are different from the poor. We have more money. We should give them some money."

The rest is history, that is everyone knows it, so there is no need to look it up.

Now advocates of New Deal ideas like social security do not completely reject the earlier notion that the poor are divided into the worthy poor and the unworthy poor. They recognised that, in our personal life, we will find some poor people more likeable than others and that this is perfectly normal. However, they also recognise that social insurance must be based on rights which are equal for everyone (that is why Roosevelt fought segregation in, for example, the armed forces).

Thus any impressions we might have of different poor people can not, under the rule of law, allow us to discriminate in favor of those we find more appealing or worthy. The distinction is important because the appalling sadism advocated by Scrooge and Gingrich and thoroughly objectively and accurately documented by Dickens (the only person you need to read to understand Victorian England) was justified by the sense that it was morally acceptable to indulge a distinction between the worthy poor and the unworthy poor.

Also Calvinism and social Darwinism had something to do with it.

Thank you professor Porphyrin. I'm sure that Gertrude Himmelfarb will appreciate your insignts.

update: Uh oh someone found my blog searching for "worthy poor". They might come to this post and take it seriously. It is a deliberate parody of what happens when people pontificate outside of their field of expertise. The rest of my blog is not deliberately such a parody. I have changed the name of the biologist to Hertrude Gimmelfarb to make it clear that she is a parody of Gertrude Himmelfarb. The views expressed by Hertrude are meant to be 1) blatantly ignorant of history and 2) offensive to Gertrude Himmelfarb.