Unreasonable Singaporeans

in another comment on the same post about social welfare (see my previous post), someone said that he/she found it disturbing to see elderly selling tissue paper and 'begging' at coffeeshops. that person has obviously not been to UK. UK, with its oh-so-wonderful social welfare system has many beggars. usually one outside a major supermarket. those are true beggars. and they aren't always elderly. in fact, many of them don't make it to become elderly.

further, i find it odd that no one thinks it is a problem that our elderly have to beg for money from the family. isn't it the family's OBLIGATION to take care of its elderly? why then should the elderly have to beg? isn't that the bigger problem? that the family cannot/is not willing to support the elderly that the government has to become the surrogate family?

of course, there are those families who cannot afford to support the elderly. there are many causes of that, some more 'legitmate' than others. some reasons include: spending too much (i.e. consuming more than they need to... i've seen families which can easily cut down their utilities bills by half, thus saving enough to support one elderly member of the family... but choose not to do so...), having more kids than they can support (no... i'm not promoting eugenics... but if you have a family income of $2000 a month... any sensible person would tell you that you probably shouldn't have 4 children...), and some, really just cannot afford to support their parents because of truly unfortunate circumstances. and there are those who cannot support their elderly parents because of the near insatiable demands of their spoilt brat kids, who demand for new handphones, branded clothes, PSPs, computer games, etc... why? not because that would really help the child become a better person, but because the other kid in school has it.

do we help every one of the above cases? what kind of signal does that send out? "oh... it's alright for you to live irresponsibly... the government would take care of you..." isn't that ironic? on one hand, we are complaining about a paternalistic government, on the other, we want the government to support us from cradle to grave. how unreasonable can we get?