it's easy to be judgmental from your place of privilege, perhaps... who knew that both you and federal were both trust fund kiddies?
So ..., let say that person who fucks up their lives with short-sighted choices again and again asks for more help. Should any government just let that person die? Should they do it for him? Execute him before he can ask again?
Privilege my hairy white ass. I wad born to working class parents who then divorced, and I have been grinding out my living ever since.
No. Any government - regardless of how controlling or how "hands off" it is, has a responsibility to all it's citizens. That is the sole function of govnernment.
That is, I actually made use of the choices I had, rather than rejecting them as unworthy of my effort.
I understand what you're saying and you know I agree. Where we disagree is the number of people who do not make good use of the choices they have. People who do make good use of the choices they have but still fall on hard times does not mean they made bad choices. It means life happened. The number of people who fall into the category you are ranting against are very small in relation to the number of people on the planet. and even among those, many have mental issues that affect their decision making abilities. The people who really do make bad decisions then expect others to clean them up, are not the ones that are requesting social safety nets in good faith. That number is an extremely small subset of the number of people who actually do request social safety nets. But, they are the ones who conservative talk show hosts love to bring up as examples of "democrats being soft".
No. That implies the right to another person's resources, which implies the right to force him to work for your benefit. No sale.
Yep, attacking all social programs because of a handful of assholes is like blowing up a busload of nuns that Jeffrey Dahmer is hiding in. ...wait, the ATF would totally do that..
Only because the US does not own any money producing industries. Therefore taxes are taken from all citizens and a fund from those taxes are set aside for social safety nets. That's not an imposition on the individual. It's the way this country functions.
only in that you consider everything an imposition. seriously... you have gotta be one of the most narcissistic excuses for a human being I've ever encountered.
If we can help the man who became homeless because medical bills bankrupted him, or the veteran who can't hold a job because Iraq traumatized him, or the mom who's homeless with her child because she fled an abusive husband, and the hundreds of other scenarios in which people fall into poverty because of circumstances beyond their free will control... and in the course of doing so we give aid to the 1% or 5% or 10% of the population in severe poverty who are there because they made poor "free will choices" of the sort a noble figure like yourself has no pity on... Yeah, let's do that. The price of the latter is a perfectly reasonable cost to pay in order to accomplish the former.
Something that the noble libertarians always fail to figure into their calculus is that poverty WILL cost the collective society some resources, regardless. In most cases it costs MORE to deal with the effects of poverty than it would cost to just lift everyone out of poverty to begin with. For example: states will take kids out of their home because parents are unable to financially support their food and shelter and health and so forth - and then literally give money to a (often regrettable) foster home to do the same things their parents could have done if you'd given the money to them....and then all the administrative costs are layered on top of that. Sick poor people WILL cost the system eventually, and they'll cost MORE for reactive care than if they'd had access to preventive care. Giving homeless people a place to stay is more cost effective than all the things we spend because there are so many homeless people. So the whole "you should make your own success/survival like I did" is not REALLY about what's cost effective, but about enjoying deliberate cruelty expressed to the folks you presume yourself to be better than.
Not quite sure why you think that the fact you were born white to married parents with jobs who then got divorced is relevant or affects your level of privilege, unless you're saying that the circumstances people are born into can influence their opportunities in life.
that ain't even factoring in the increases in crime of all sorts, let alone the cost of policing it. how may millions of dollars did Toronto spend last summer to kick homeless people out of parks? probably as much as it would've cost to house them effectively, rather than in the shelters.