It's great that they were all working so hard in grinding poverty and just letting the weak die or whatever, very inspirational, but being vaguely aware of reality might have served them better overall.
The New Deal agriculture subsidies must have really confused them if they didn't even know about the state government.
https://www.oregonhistoryproject.org/narratives/the-world-ru...
Hopefully they can ditch those unhelpful socioeconomic adaptations they picked up now they've rejoined society.
It shouldn't exactly come as a shock that the people who have to live in proximity to the results of such systems have more to say about the downsides than those who can just observe from their ivory tower and can look at some spreadsheet, do a little math and say things like "net positive" with a clear conscience. Even if you have very good results the former group is simply going to be much more aware of the tradeoffs than the latter who will at best only know second hand.
Potato, potahto
This wildly underestimates how rich some people are in the US. For example, just 5% of the wealth from only the 20 wealthiest Americans would cover all federal, state and local funding for housing support in a year.
Then I wondered, "what kind of tax could cover that cost?" and I found a list of net worths and saw that about 5% of the wealth of the top 20 US billionaires covered that entire spending for a year. There's much more compelling comparisons to be made but I didn't have all day.
In my experience, these attitudes are more common among those who live around poor people than among those who don't. It's my wife who taught me the difference between "people who are good at being poor and ones who aren't." Coming from a privileged background, I had no idea.
It's a sociocultural adaptation to scarcity. Historically, whether you were in a Bangladeshi village or rural Oregon, even the rich don't really have sufficient surplus to help more than a few people. And there were no rich foreigners or central government to swoop in. In that scenario, anticipating and expecting help is maladaptive. Everybody in the village needs to be incentivized to work as hard as possible for themselves before relying on anyone else.