Brutus, in this thread, made a post I thought brought up a couple of interesting questions.
First, his post:
Now, my questions:
Are Americans “entitled” to anything? Do all citizens, or anyone at all for that matter, “deserve” to have access to anything? If so, what? How do the answers apply to such things as the African AIDS crisis, the war in Iraq, and other international issues?
Given the willingness to work any job whatsoever, is it possible to starve in the United States?
Discuss. 
Thats interesting…
First let me give my opinions on your questions:
I also believe that every child/young adult should have the right to a decent education, so that no one is massively disadvantaged in life just because their parents were poor.
I’d like to know what Brutus or any other hard right winger’s perspective on this is. Do you honestly think that noone has the right to live? Do you think anyone has the right to education?
I’m not sure I phrase such basic necessities as food, shelter, health care as “rights.”
Instead, I view them in terms of what degree of “safety net” I wish my government to provide.
Seeing as ignorance is a factor in so many societal problems, access to education is high on my list.
Socialism is not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately it has gained a bad reputation from the repressive Socialist states that we have seen around the world. When you say “Socialist” to an American, he will probably think of Communism. Yet there are good Socialist states. Sweden comes immediately to mind. I’d hate to pay the taxes, but there are definitely benefits.
The U.S. is the richest country on the planet. Being a rich nation, I think that the nation owes more to its citizens than it’s giving. We have MediCare, but the coverage it provides is not as good as it should be. From what I’ve heard, it’s not nearly as good as health coverage in other nations.
What are we entitled to? Protection from other nations. We get that with our powerful military. But I also think we are entitled to adequate health care. Actually, more than adequate since the country is such a rich one. I think that people should not lose coverage when they lose their jobs. Since I believe that, I see no reason to have one system for the employed and a seperate system for the unemployed. I think that the money that comes out of my paycheque for health coverage should go to a single provider instead of some of it going to my own insurance and some of it going to state-sponsored health care. I also think that education is important, as Dinsdale said. Children should be educated properly before they leave school, and anyone who wishes to should be able to attend college.
I think the question of “entitlement” obscures the more important questions: what roles should government have beyond protecting borders and providing rule of law? In a society based on democratic principles of representation, these aren’t questions that are ever resolved. The answers change with the vision of the greater society, which, I believe, rarely desires any portion of its population to be ignorant, starving and homeless. Thus, some “safety net” must be provided through the major mechanisms by which the public will is expressed… which in Western democracies mostly means government action. It’s the size and strength of that safety net which vacillates with the zeitgeist; but the elimination of that net entirely isn’t a viable proposal.
As a percentage, very few people actually need alot of intervention by government to survive, but people get ticked off becuase alot of people have put a great deal of effort into being losers and having someone scrape their ass off the ground for them.
Some people are starving in America: Alot of children who are victims of druggie parents, alcoholic parents and promiscuous parents.
But alot of people who are supposedly in need are home with a new DVD player and XBOX. Sure, they are behind on their gas bills, live in subsidized homes, have no front door because they are too stupid to take care of their house first, but they collect from every program available…from WIC, to SSN, Disability…whatever. If you count all these miscreants, you’d think the US had alot of needy people.
The really needy are mental health patients who live on the streets as homeless people, the children I mentioned and a few others.
Alot of time, just well organized private charity AIMED IN THE RIGHT direction can help.
ha ha ha, roflmaof
what amuses me most and is in the’ most disturbing’ catagory at the same time, coz of thier inane use of thier high tech WMD killing machines they have, ’ is the Americans delusions of grandeur, they, a county, who is Zillions of $$$$$ US in detb, thinks of itself as a ‘rich’ country…
thier national detb spirals faster than the eye can watch the ticker tape on Wall street…
just who do they think they are kidding?
rich in what, blood of Irakis so your $ price of oil can go down a few cents per barrel.??
if it wasnt so absurd and tragic, thier self importance would be hilarious…
what i want to know is, why the frig do we have to be subjected to watching thier killing machine in action 24/24???
ffs, what i want to see, is just what happened in Afganistan after you laid the country waste, we saw it 24/24 whilst you you were doing it, but now?? - nothing. are they better or worse of for your interferance? - will Irak be the same, post invasion? - will we hear nothing whilst you loot it dry?
Zanthor
Well that’s all lovely, Zanthor, but do you have anything to contribute to the specific question of entitlement, or the general question of the role of government? (Not even necessarily about America.)
If not, then thanks for your kind observations, but please run and play in a more suitable thread for anti-American polemics.
Have a nice evening.
The old argument about which injustice is more unjust: children starving to death or forcing non-starving people to feed them. Eventually someone from the far economic right says “Taxation is theft” prompting a similarly wacko leftist to say the same about property.
After all the high-minded debates, it comes down to what level of deprivation an electorate finds it acceptable to see on the streets. The bigger the holes in the safety net, the messier it looks when someone falls through it.
All those ugly cunts are entitled to go and get fucked.
THEY ARE FUCKING NIGGERS.
STUPID FUCKERS!
Asked Leaper:
To which I answer:
As payment for the purchase of the vast majority of the lower 48 states from Indian tribes through perpetual treaties, the United States in many cases guaranteed the health, safety, welfare, and economic opportunity of certain American Indian tribes. These guarantees have been construed by the courts to mean the the federal government has a similar obligation to all Indian tribes. Despite the fact that the United States almost universally failed–and continues to fail–to deliver on these transactions, they are regularly upheld in court, and the U.S. is almost daily prompted by some court, somewhere, to deliver the services which they promised to deliver. (When this happens, the Bureau of Indian Affairs almost always robs Peter to pay Paul by cutting general services to satisfy specific requirements.)
When it comes to peoples’ opinions on how to treat American Indian tribes, the conservative point of view almost always focuses on the way it ought to be rather than the way it actually is. In a much more general sense, I suspect that someone more qualified than myself will come along here and tell you that Brutus’ opinion is cut from the same fanciful yet factually threadbare cloth.
I would argue that the federal government does have an obligation to “promote the general Welfare” of the American people as a whole.
The obvious fact that it doesn’t is not an argument in favor of the idea that it shouldn’t.
[Jumpin’ Jehosephat. I see on preview that I am preceded by a prime example of someone who argues what ought to be instead of what is. I recommend that ugly fellow dust off a clue from the gutter before he participates further in this thread.]
Is this Moron Day in Australia or something? 
IMO, it all comes down to how much the government wants to invest in their citizenry.
We have public schools because most people recognize the value of having a high-functioning populace. We wouldn’t be able to function very well as a society if 70% of the populace was illiterate. We have free schools so that people can’t cite poverty as an excuse for not being educated. We have schools in every community so that people can’t cite distance as an excuse. In doing so, we ensure, as best we can, that every boy and girl living in this country has access to knowledge and can become good educated citizens.
Social welfare serves a similar role. If we as a society don’t want people sleeping on the streets, for whatever reason, we as a society need to ensure that there’s affordable housing. If we don’t want to be mugged every time we step out of the front door, we need to ensure that if you’re broke, you don’t have to resort to crime to get food. If we don’t want idiots serving us at McDonald’s, we need to ensure that poor children are fed so that their brains don’ disentegrate due to malnutrition and hunger. If we don’t want political unrest (aka riots), we need to ensure that people are given choices and opportunities in their life.
The poor will always be with us, even in the most ideal circumstances. The government is not obligated to help the poor, not any more than the government is obligated to fund public libraries. But is it in the government’s best interest to provide some basic level of support to its citizens? Yes. IMO, this is the best argument for social welfare programs.
People are entitled to what was promised to them. Therefore, for example, retirees who put in money for Social Security are now entitled to collect money under those same provisions. Veterans who were promised benefits for enlisting are entitled to those benefits.
Other programs (that are called “entitlement” programs), such as welfare, etc. are not entitlements. People are not entitled to them. The government may provide for them because they feel it is in the public’s best interest to do so, but it’s no more an entitlement than public libraries.
Likewise, the government (in the form of the Constitution) promises us certain rights (freedom of speech, religion, etc.) to which we are entitled. The ability to go to a movie, OTOH, is not an entitlement.
Zev Steinhardt
**
I don’t believe the right to live should come at the expense of other human beings. My need for food, clothing, or shelter doesn’t mean that I have a right to anything of yours. Of course I’m all for helping people who are down on their luck.
Marc
It IS possible to starve to death in America. But the people who do so are either mentally ill, or dependents of the mentally ill. There is free food provided in every town in America, but you have to know where the food is being distributed, and feel a desire to go and get it.
The cops CAN pick you up off the street and send you to the psych unit for evaluation, but you can only be held for observation for 72 hours unless the docs think you are a danger to yourself or others. And if you are a schizophrenic, and they put you back on your meds while under observation, and you get better, then you are no longer a danger and must be released even if you are going to go off your meds the minute you are released.
If schizophrenia makes you so crazy that you can’t find the food bank or soup kitchen, and you throw away your social security check and your food stamps, and every time the cops pick you up you can’t be commited, then you might starve. Also, if you trade your food stamps and cash for drugs, you might slowly starve yourself to death. Or if your parents are crazy and lock you in the basement and feed you nothing but lettuce you might starve. Or if you are anorexic and refuse to eat you might starve. But it takes a certain amount of determination to starve yourself to death.
You Europeans seem to have a very funny idea about how America actually operates. Sometimes I get the idea that you think Blade Runner was a documentary, that the average American is a crack addicted gang member who lives in a burnt out shack listening to gunfire all night, while the wealthy aristocrats point and laugh. If you get all your ideas about America from movies and TV shows you’re not getting the full picture. I understand that the average Australian doesn’t wrestle crocodiles and cook kangaroo meat over an open fire while herding sheep at his opal mine. Why is this so hard to understand?
Every so often I hear a statement along the lines of “Everybody has a right to…” (food, shelter, health care, etc.). Well, no: those aren’t rights, they’re needs. So the question is, does everyone have a right to have all their basic needs met? And the answer can’t possibly be yes in an absolute sense; there’s got to be some personal responsibility involved. If everybody just sat around in bean bag chairs and insisted on their right to be fed and cared for, everyone would starve because nobody’d be doing the feeding. (And sometimes people need things that, sadly, no one can provide them, like a cure for cancer or AIDS.)
Rights, in the good old, Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, sense of the term, tend to be things we have automatically unless someone takes them away from us, not things we wouldn’t have unless someone else specifically gave them to us. ("…endowed by their Creator…") “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” implies to me that we ought to be able to at least try to get for ourselves what we need for our physical, mental, psychological, and spiritual well-being. The government’s main role is to keep other individuals, groups, and itself from putting obstacles in our way, infringing on our rights, so that we have the opportunity to meet our own needs and pursue our own happiness.
Lest I sound too unreservedly conservative, let me add that I do think there are other things the government can legitimately do because we, as a society, want them done and they can be done most efficiently or fairly through the government. But when you think of them as rights or entitlements, you’re off track.
Sorry, that was a knee-jerk reaction to moc.liamtoh@rorrin’s post, and upon reflection I realize it was both un-called-for and inappropriate in this thread. Please accept my apologies.
Speaking as an American, I feel entitled to live in a country that is willing to provide decent public schools and reasonable help for those of us in trouble.
What’s reasonable? Oh, that’s a whole 'nother debate.
No bloody worries from this Aussie. 
I thought it was funny. Moron Day would make a cool new public holiday.
Actually, we do have our own little group of Australian “problem children”, as Tuba calls them. They’ve been quiet on the boards for a year or so. Looks like moc.liamtoh@norom might be one of those.