I'm talking about Section 8, WiC, food stamps and public assistance.
I hate to say, but I don't see charitable donations outdoing the food stamps then what is provided by the state. Its hard to debate this with people, because liberals will often use these Government programs as a necessity for helping people
Would people get as effective help without these welfare programs? There's obviously a lot of problems with privatizing them, so I really don't see what to say.
We also have high standards of living with a population of 300 million.
Democracy for Breakfast: But that would be so cruel and heartless to not care about people. "A society is judged by how they treat their lower citizens". /End liberal argument.
But that would be so cruel and heartless to not care about people. "A society is judged by how they treat their lower citizens".
/End liberal argument.
That's why charity exists. Isn't it more heartless to condemn people to perpetual poverty through the welfare state?
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Democracy for Breakfast: But that would be so cruel and heartless to not care about people. "A society is judged by how they treat their lower citizens". /End liberal argument. Thats the rhetoric my Social Studies teacher from High School used.
Thats the rhetoric my Social Studies teacher from High School used.
lol, the liberals have soft hearts but it extends to their minds. they care so much about 'poverty' that they steal from the productive in society and trap the 'poor' in their poverty instituting them as a fixed class.
Read what George Reisman wrote in his book on 'opportunities'.
hazlitt also wrote a book on poverty. its quite good despite the minarchism.
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
Tell'em it's an appeal to emotion, which is a fallacy. Or, you could tell the professor that his presence negatively affects your emotions, and therefore, he should leave the classroom.
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Democracy for Breakfast:
However, what if someone can't make a living because they go bankrupt to pay for health care?
What kind of situation are trying to describe? Where someone is sick and cant work, so they can go on welfare to survive? Are they terminally ill? Temporarially disabled? Permanently disabled? What someone can do is entirely dependant on their specific circumstances.
People are highly resourceful when faced with adversity. It does not matter what the adversity is. When there is no longer a need to act for your own well being, people don't. They become complacent and dependant. This is what welfare, unemployment, and universal health care do. They remove the need for people to act on thier own behalf, critically think about their own lives and about the decisions that they make. I think that the situation that I described above demonstrates this concept very well. People travel thousands of miles and save up extrodinary amounts of money to fulfull their needs. The ones who have their needs filled by the government cant even travel one hundred miles or save a dime. It is only here in extremely wealthy societies that we teach and institutionalize helplessness.
All the good intentions of the progressives have done nothing, but create and foster a world where nothing changes because there is no need to change. That is the cycle of poverty that our dogooders talk about so much, but it is thier solutions that created the cycle. So to answer your concerns more directly people will find a way as long as they have the need to find a way, and government programs will only impoverish us all.
Democracy for Breakfast: But that would be so cruel and heartless to not care about people. "A society is judged by how they treat their lower citizens".
That is the problem with many people who see the need for government action. I'd have to partly agree to "A society is judged by how they treat their lower citizens"
People tend to mix up the ideas of state and society to mean the same thing. In this case, they view any people as citizens and any citizens as people. The quote above is framed in such a way, to make one think that recognized agents of the state (citizens) are to be looked after by society, and the only way to do this is through government action.
Their veiwpoint is that something is wrong with society, and political action must be used to rectify that problem in society. They justify political action because it "helps poeple" but they seldom realize they are hurting poeple who are forced into helping these people. In most cases, this polticial action to help people actually hurts people it is said to help.
The libertarian viewpoint is that such political action through the state is ethically wrong because the state is illegitimate and the actions of the state break the nonaggression rule. A society free of the state would be more productive and more free to help those in their society who are in need.
The appeal to "charity" is a truly ironic one. First, it is hardly "charity" to take wealth by force and hand it over to someone else. -Rothbard
@ the OP
I just finished Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market yesterday, and Rothbard has this beautiful section on this issue.
Rothbard: The appeal to "charity" is a truly ironic one. First, it is hardly "charity" to take wealth by force and hand it over to someone else. Indeed, this is the direct opposite of charity, which can only be an unbought, voluntary act of grace. Compulsory confiscation can only deaden charitable desires completely, as the wealthier grumble that there is no point in giving to charity when the State has already taken on the task. This is another illustration of the truth that men can become more moral only through rational persuasion, not through violence, which will, in fact, have the opposite effect. Furthermore, since the State is always inefficient, the amount and direction of the giving will be much different from what it would be if people were left free to act on their own. If the State decides from whom to take and to whom to give, the power residing in the State's hands is enormous. It is obvious that political unfortunates will be the ones whose property is confiscated, and political favorites the ones subsidized. And in the meantime the State erects a bureaucracy whose living is acquired by feeding off the confiscation of one group and the encouraged mendicancy of another. Other consequences follow from a regime of compulsory "charity." For one thing, "the poor"-or the "deserving" poor-have been exalted as a privileged caste, with an enforceable claim to the production of the more able. This is a far cry from a request for charity. Instead, the able are penalized and enslaved by the State, and the unable are placed on a moral pedestal. Certainly, this is a peculiar sort of moral program. The further consequence will be to discourage the able, to reduce production and saving in all of society, and beyond this, to subsidize the creation of a caste of poor. Not only will the poor be subsidized by right, but their ranks will be encouraged to multiply, both through reproduction and through their moral exaltation and subsidization. The able will be correspondingly hampered and repressed. Whereas the opportunity for voluntary charity acts as a spur to production by the able, coerced charity acts as a drain and a burden upon production. In fact, in the long run, the greatest "charity" is precisely not what we know by that name, but rather simple, "selfish" capital investment and the search for technological innovations. Poverty has been tamed by the enterprise and the capital investment of our ancestors, most of which was undoubtedly done for "selfish" motives. This is a fundamental illustration of the truth enunciated by Adam Smith that we generally help others most in those very activities in which we help ourselves. Statists, in fact, are really opposed to charity. They often argue that charity is demeaning and degrading to the recipient, and that he should therefore be taught that the money is rightly his, to be given to him by the government as his due. But this oft-felt degradation stems, as Isabel Paterson pointed out, from the fact that the recipient of charity is not self-supporting on the market and that he is out of the production circuit and no longer providing a service in exchange for one received. However, granting him the moral and legal right to mulct his fellows increases his moral degradation instead of ending it, for the beneficiary is now further removed from the production line than ever. An act of charity, when given voluntarily, is generally considered temporary and offered with the object of helping a man to help himself. But when the dole is ladled out by the State, it becomes permanent and perpetually degrading, keeping the recipients in a state of subservience. We are not attempting to argue at this point that to be subservient in this way is degrading; we simply say that anyone who considers private charity degrading must logically conclude that State charity is far more so. Mises, furthermore, points out that free-market exchange-always condemned by statists for being impersonal and "unfeeling"-is precisely the relation that avoids all degradation and subservience.
The appeal to "charity" is a truly ironic one. First, it is hardly "charity" to take wealth by force and hand it over to someone else. Indeed, this is the direct opposite of charity, which can only be an unbought, voluntary act of grace. Compulsory confiscation can only deaden charitable desires completely, as the wealthier grumble that there is no point in giving to charity when the State has already taken on the task. This is another illustration of the truth that men can become more moral only through rational persuasion, not through violence, which will, in fact, have the opposite effect.
Furthermore, since the State is always inefficient, the amount and direction of the giving will be much different from what it would be if people were left free to act on their own. If the State decides from whom to take and to whom to give, the power residing in the State's hands is enormous. It is obvious that political unfortunates will be the ones whose property is confiscated, and political favorites the ones subsidized. And in the meantime the State erects a bureaucracy whose living is acquired by feeding off the confiscation of one group and the encouraged mendicancy of another.
Other consequences follow from a regime of compulsory "charity." For one thing, "the poor"-or the "deserving" poor-have been exalted as a privileged caste, with an enforceable claim to the production of the more able. This is a far cry from a request for charity. Instead, the able are penalized and enslaved by the State, and the unable are placed on a moral pedestal. Certainly, this is a peculiar sort of moral program. The further consequence will be to discourage the able, to reduce production and saving in all of society, and beyond this, to subsidize the creation of a caste of poor. Not only will the poor be subsidized by right, but their ranks will be encouraged to multiply, both through reproduction and through their moral exaltation and subsidization. The able will be correspondingly hampered and repressed.
Whereas the opportunity for voluntary charity acts as a spur to production by the able, coerced charity acts as a drain and a burden upon production. In fact, in the long run, the greatest "charity" is precisely not what we know by that name, but rather simple, "selfish" capital investment and the search for technological innovations. Poverty has been tamed by the enterprise and the capital investment of our ancestors, most of which was undoubtedly done for "selfish" motives. This is a fundamental illustration of the truth enunciated by Adam Smith that we generally help others most in those very activities in which we help ourselves.
Statists, in fact, are really opposed to charity. They often argue that charity is demeaning and degrading to the recipient, and that he should therefore be taught that the money is rightly his, to be given to him by the government as his due. But this oft-felt degradation stems, as Isabel Paterson pointed out, from the fact that the recipient of charity is not self-supporting on the market and that he is out of the production circuit and no longer providing a service in exchange for one received. However, granting him the moral and legal right to mulct his fellows increases his moral degradation instead of ending it, for the beneficiary is now further removed from the production line than ever. An act of charity, when given voluntarily, is generally considered temporary and offered with the object of helping a man to help himself. But when the dole is ladled out by the State, it becomes permanent and perpetually degrading, keeping the recipients in a state of subservience. We are not attempting to argue at this point that to be subservient in this way is degrading; we simply say that anyone who considers private charity degrading must logically conclude that State charity is far more so. Mises, furthermore, points out that free-market exchange-always condemned by statists for being impersonal and "unfeeling"-is precisely the relation that avoids all degradation and subservience.
Conagain: no, people WILL NOT get the help they get today (or else they'd be getting it today) BUT, why should they? Helping losers is an abomination of nature and hinderence to social progress. We don't prop up banks and bad business, why should we prop up bad people?
no, people WILL NOT get the help they get today (or else they'd be getting it today)
BUT, why should they? Helping losers is an abomination of nature and hinderence to social progress.
We don't prop up banks and bad business, why should we prop up bad people?
Conagain: not only that, they shouldn't be better off, supporting the poor is encouraging laziness and failure
not only that, they shouldn't be better off, supporting the poor is encouraging laziness and failure
I think we all need to accept the fact that society would just be better off if we got rid of the undesirables.
That's pretty vulgar - why assume that the *only* reason why someone is poor or in bad conditions is simply because they are lazy or losers? That's quite oversimplistic. "Bad people" is stretching it.
That troll is no longer with us.
If you find something evil that wobbles, push it. - Gary North
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