I’ll be sending you shipping instructions so you can send me your computer, based on the reason I’m NOT putting a gun to your head and making you do it. I’m still entitled to the results of robbery anyway.
While your at it, send any gold jewelry and your TV too. Got anything else I’d want?
I mean, I figure, I could get more by robbing than the government passes out, so I’m not motivated to give up my “right to rob” in favor of lesser goodies.
There isn’t any right to rob, and your argument is dependent upon a “right” to rob.
A silly argument. First, you won’t die if you don’t have my computer. And second, I’m not one of the people arguing that compassion and the needs & desires of other people don’t matter. I’m not one of the people trying to pretend that self interest is all that matters and that the weak should perish.
However, if society holds that the less fortunate should simply die, then it has for all practical purposes declared war on them. So, yes there’s a “right to rob” if the only alternative is death. For that matter, there’s a right to kill if the only alternative is death. When society starts condemning people to death out of greed and indifference then it’s in no position to start collectively whining about what its victims do to stay alive. Even if that means they need to steal, or if it means they need to form themselves into an army and topple the regime that is killing them.
I don’t disagree with you that the unfortunate should be helped out. But your reasoning that I owe it to them because they didn’t rob me is where I take issue.
Ok, let us suppose a general right to kill. Which of us has the superior right to kill the other? The one who faces death if he does not kill, you say? Now say I face death if I do not kill you because you’re coming at me with a deadly weapon. Let’s say you face death from starvation, and extrapolate that into a threat that is sourced in me.
Now, since you seem to support this right universally, I suppose you’d include lazy people as having the right too. Now, if the reason you’re starving is you spent your seed money smoking crack, or gambled it away, or you prefered watching TV to doing the planting, or something equally irresponsible, and you didn’t harvest any crops, how is that fair? I’m a hard worker but you’re not, therefore you have a right to kill me?
Now, if the situation is like Guatemala around 1910-30 you have a case where I’d say it’s ok to kill over starvation. But there United Fruit pretty much owned the whole country, left most fields lay fallow, then put too small a portion of a starving populace to work for miniscule wages. If you say that’s substantially the condition of America today, are you arguing for revolution?
If you have no obligation to them, then they have no obligation to you. “It’s OK to let people starve, but not to steal to avoid starvation” is a one sided position, one designed to benefit the prosperous at the cost of the less prosperous. So yes, you owe it to them because they are playing by the rules of civilized behavior; if continuing to play by those rules will get them killed then they are under no obligation to follow a one sided arrangement that is protecting you and killing them.
If society decides it has no obligation towards the less fortunate, then they no longer have any obligations towards it. Symmetry. If society wants the less fortunate to be civilized, it should be civilized towards them; if it wants to play by dog-eat-dog rules it shouldn’t be surprised when they act by the same ruthless rules.
You do realize you are attempting to argue away the right to self defense?
Nonsense; I clearly and repeatedly said people who have no alternative to theft than death. Working is an alternative.
No, my attempt is to get you to understand that its the guy getting attacked who has a right to kill, if less than killing won’t protect his safety; the guy who attacks him doesn’t.
Sounds like you’re now in favor of a right to earn your living. Good Deal.
Let me expand a little bit. First, let’s realize that hyperventilating about ‘entitlement’, while long a pastime of Republicans, is even more of a focus for the Tea Partiers. Now let’s ask ourselves who the Tea Partiers are. From here:
It doesn’t really matter how ingenious or clear of an argument you make about why we don’t just throw our vulnerable people to the dogs, the Evangelicals will.not.listen.to.you. They can’t be reached with reasoning.
If this question was posed by someone with a name other that heathen earthling, I’d suspect it was simply a case of right wing JAQing off. Still, considering the audience whose opinion needs to be swayed on this issue, probably the best hope of having any effect at all is to point out 1. One of the themes of the Bible itself is that faith can make you do the very dumbest things and 2. Libertarianism is a faith. It is what evangelicals hide behind these days. That article I cited thinks so anyway:
The focus needs to be on forcing an explanation of their policies in which libertarianism is a logically-arrived-at conclusion or a clear solution to common problems. It’s neither, it is a faith, and the Bible itself casts Abraham in a story with the theme, “Acting on faith can lead you to ruin everything if nobody who knows better is available to step in and stop you.”
Nonsense. Libertarianism has zero respect for personal freedoms; if you aren’t the government, libertarians are fine with you oppressing and exploiting people. Libertarianism is “the anarchy of the Right”, the “anarchy of the strong”; it is about a system where the wealthy and powerful can do as they like, and the main function of the government is to protect them from their victims. It is the ideology of the hopelessly naive and the ruthlessly predatory.
Where did you hear about this case? I’d like to see a cite that most people advocating to raise the minimum wage are lime-and-caviar rich kids.
What about the spoiled rich kid who inherits a fortune but doesn’t want to pay any taxes on it vs. people who are working really hard?
When I think of entitlements I think mainly of Social Security and Medicare–programs for old people, or the disabled.
To what extent are “entitlements” geared toward giving able-bodied young people a perpetual free ride–as opposed to a temporary helping hand in periods of crisis?
I never claimed that “most people seeking to raise the minimum wage are lime-and-caviar rich kids.” Why don’t you reread my post very, very carefully.
I am doing nothing more than modeling one type of “sense of entitlement.”
There are all kinds of able bodied young people out there, diagnosed ADD or Bi-polar, getting SSDI checks every month. In my view they are playing up their illness. Most would go get jobs if they weren’t getting the check.
Actually, a lot of the wealth of the world is now extracted by relatively few people using machines (various forms of technology, in short) that vastly amplify their ability to do work. Now, while the operators of those machines should not be our slaves, why should not the machines be our slaves?
Social Security is only an entitlement in the sense that those who have paid into it are entitled to get their money back when they reach retirement. And … they are.
Please; most wealth is in the hands of people who don’t do much if anything to produce it. Hard work and how much wealth you produce has virtually nothing to do with how much wealth you get. If anything there’s a negative correlation; the more you are responsible for producing the wealth of society, the harder you work the less reward you earn and the more likely you are in the end to be left unemployed and in poverty while the people who profited from your labor relax in luxury, pat themselves on the back over their own God-given superiority and sneer at your misery as proof of it.
Perhaps that is more of a statement demonstrating that it may be unwise to work for others, or someone who will not treat you fairly according to the wealth you produce.
At any rate the problem you identify is solved by working for yourself.
Does that apply to the financial leaders who ruined the global economy and felt entitled to not only keep their jobs, but get massive bonuses as well? BTW, they were entitled, through the relaxing of regulations, to gamble recklessly with the savings of hard working people.