usmbguest5318
Gold Member
Habitual able bodied beggars should be awarded a taxpayer funded fishing pole, a tent, some necessities for rugged survival and a bus ride to a resource rich wilderness. Early settlers had to start from scratch and live off the land...why shouldn't our pet humans have to do the same?
Early settlers had to start from scratch
Well, perhaps some did, but many didn't. Surely you don't think the only things on the ships that brought intrepid Europeans to the New World contained only humans and enough food and water for the voyage where upon arriving, they were dropped off and had no equipment and other material resources along with money. After all, Australia, not North America, was England's penal colony. More importantly, however, among people who couldn't finance the trip on their own, they arrived with a sure job and some sort of housing arrangement. Accordingly, left to their own devices was not the nature of their situation upon landing in the colonies.
For however romantic be the notion of "starting from scratch," that's really not the situation faced by most colonists. And it certainly was not the situation of the earlier explorers like Cortez, DeSoto, Coronado, et al. Nor was it the plight of most settlers in the westward expansion of America, something that's made pretty apparent by the simple observation that one doesn't need a wagon to carry one's stuff if one doesn't have stuff. People who haven't got stuff, or who have very little stuff need a bag of some sort, not a wagon.