Call me a big ol' meany, but ...

I read the following Scripture passage from 2 Thessalonians from today's Divine Office:

Do not let anyone have any food if he refuses to do any work. Now we hear that there are some of you who are living in idleness, doing no work themselves but interfering with everyone else’s. In the Lord Jesus Christ, we order and call on people of this kind to go on quietly working and earning the food that they eat. My brothers, never grow tired of doing what is right.

My question is this: If Scripture is divinely inspired and thus true and free from error, then why have so many in the Catholic justice field worked for the exact opposite? I know there are some who can't work, and there are widows and orphans, the working poor, and the like, but what of those who won't work, for whom social assistance has become social dependence?

Indeed, the high tax rates needed to support such assistance have become confiscatory. With how many women have I spoken who would gladly give up their jobs in favor of the homes were they not needed to simply support their families? In 1948, the average federal tax rate for a family of four was $0.02 per dollar. Look at your stub now and see the federal income tax. Does it even come close to two cents?

Think of what that extra income would do for families. Mothers could stay home. Families could save. They could more easily afford major purchases like when the dryer goes on the blink and they need a new one. Or when the car broke down, it wouldn't thus be a need to have recourse to the almighty credit card.

When, however, did you hear Sr. Pat of the Greater Tri-County Area Committee on Social Justice or Tim Anonymous from the USCCB or state bishops conference make such an argument. You haven't, you won't today, and you probably never will. These people all still belong to the Democrat Party at Prayer and the Society of Our Lady of the Great Society, and such thinking is anathema to them.

Meanwhile, schlubs like me toil and think, "Man, I am never going to get ahead," for after the tax man cometh, there ain't much left. Praise God we're getting by. But do the people supposedly dedicated to a more just society have to actively work to make that fact less likely? Where's the justice in that?