Libertarian CEO says the 'mentally retarded' should be happy to work for $2 an hour

[ND-Dem]

12. yep. "If you’re disabled, it’s not just Lord Freud who holds you in contempt"

You’ll know the observation attributed to Gandhi that “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members” – or, if not, you will recall a similar sentiment expressed by someone else. Samuel Johnson, Dietrich Bonhoeffer … just about anybody who’s ever appeared in a GCSE textbook has come up with such a line.

For most of my life the truism has seemed precisely that: so uncontroversial as to be a cliche. Sure, you could argue the toss over what good treatment means, or who should be included among the vulnerable. But no matter how moth-eaten and means-tested their welfare state, how dilute their social democracy, the first world, G7-club British would never publicly repudiate their commitments to the sick, the elderly, the poor. Until the past four years, and the election of a government that treats disabled people with a scarcely believable callousness.

The prompt for this piece is of course Lord Freud’s musings on whether people with disabilities should work for £2 an hour. Or, rather, it’s the debate that has dutifully followed in parliament and the press over what the welfare minister meant and whether in private he’s a sensitive flower. Because such semantics are entirely to miss the point. The comments are just the smallest injury Freud has dealt disabled people. Under the benefit reforms and spending cuts brought in by Freud and his colleagues Iain Duncan Smith, George Osborne and David Cameron, people with disabilities have been hit harder by austerity than any other group you might think of.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/20/disabled-lord-freud-austerity