Veterans don’t need state dependency. They need rehabilitation and a sense of belonging.
And here’s how we get there.
Published in
2 min readMay 15, 2019
Government intervention in the form of basic income and free healthcare is all well and good, but merely creating a culture of welfare dependency for veterans is naïve at best, grossly negligent at worst.
UBI and free healthcare for all may work for everyone, but singling veterans out and providing these just for them creates two problems:
- It ensures that these liberal reforms will never be implemented for everyone, and gives the GOP a great excuse for failing to implement them for all
- Veterans (who are typically proud and less willing to accept help) are dependent on the state. This is both a psychological and an economic disadvantage, demonstrating the extent of the negative effects that such poor and ill-considered policy can have
Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Democratic Presidential candidate and veteran of the Afghanistan war, has spoken about how his town in Indiana, South Bend, has been combating the problems faced by veterans in a quite different way.
Their approach has been to rehabilitate veterans back into the community, through community-led schemes. Big government can solve many problems, but the state, by nature…
