It's hurtful, because it's as if I'm being called a parasite or that my income somehow makes me less of a person.
Maybe this is a bit off-topic, but the word "parasite" made me think of something. One and a half century ago, during the Congrès de la Paix (chaired by Victor Hugo) in 1849, the following words were written down:
"la patrie sans la frontière,
le budget sans le parasitisme,
le commerce sans la douane,
l’éducation sans l’abrutissement,
la jeunesse sans la caserne,
le courage sans le combat,
la justice sans l’échafaud,
la vérité sans le dogme"
Budget without parasitism. I always found it strange that some people refer to the (subsidized) poor as "parasites". Parasites, the very definition of it, are not "things" that receive something (in casu: from the government), but that
take something. We can only conclude the only parasite is the government or the political classes (cf. the theory of the political class of for example Bastiat, Oppenheimer, Nock, Rothbard and Konkin instead of the mainstream Marxist class theory).
Some say: "These poor, these people on welfare, they are parasites," but one cannot deny the fact that it is not the poor who
take the money, they are merely given something. Sure, they can be the reason why it is taken (because of bourgeois empathy or socialist activism, to name two reasons), but for that, they are not to blame, the system is.
