Does your employer have an “infinite commitment” to pay your salary?

Of course they do, but it isn’t framed as such.

We’re talking about social support networks here basically, the majority of actually poor people have nowhere to turn (or too much pride to turn anywhere).

There are some people who will be a bottomless pit of investment, and it is because of those that we think social support cannot work at all. The drug addicts, the gamblers.

but for each of those, immediately visible and obvious deadbeats there are 2 or more of people like my mother, who had no family to speak of and was raising a child alone. Or someone like the sysadmin in this thread, who has gainful employment in the first world, but can never get out of his debt hole.