First, the way you tell over the story it sounds completely legal. Twisted that the programs incentivize not working, but legal.
And if it’s not legal, we certainly don’t take our morals from him. We need a higher standard. I too have had non-Jews ask me to do some things when they did work for me that I refused, so I’m not by any stretch claiming that this is not widespread. It is; there is hundreds of billions of dollars of Medicaid fraud yearly, and our community can’t possibly AC AC account for more than a small fraction.
And I don’t desire to bring out more real anecdotes because why should I say bad about us? But we have to recognize that it’s a huge problem, and we also have to recognize that when so many of us go on programs, isn’t it asking that this happen?
There is one other community that might be on programs in the widespread way that we are, and believe me we don’t want to be affiliated with them.
I myself learned in kollel for several years as did many members of my family. After living the really nice lifestyle that many of us were able to live while learning and being supported (not on programs), no one was really in the mood to go to work afterwards. You had men who were meeting their first financial responsibility at thirty one years old.
Does that make any sense?