Title speaks for itself.
A simple yes/no will do, but feel free to expand on that thought if you’d like.
No, as much as I would like to say that America owes everyone a chance to achieve the American Dream, you have to play by the rules that have been set up. If you play by the rules, you can get a job and an income. If you refuse to, I don’t think you are due anything. I have hundreds of jobs I can offer people. All have a guaranteed paycheck, but I can’t fill many of the positions that I have, because the applicants violated the law. I hate to say it, but I don’t owe them anything.
SSG Schwartz
No.
It’s good and one could even say crucial (at least socially/morally) to help out people in need, but nobody is OWED either a job or an income just for breathing.
Yes. Ever since the government stepped in and regulated (restricted) what natural resources could and could not be exploited by citizens, then they owe us a way to provide for the bare necessities, since they took away the ability to do it for ourselves.
Every person deserves to have their basic needs met. That means food, shelter, education and health care. The way this society is structured, that mostly necessitates having a job. I say if you’re going to build a society in which having a job is crucial to survival, then you have an obligation to provide those jobs.
You get a free education which, in theory, will teach you basic skills. You use those basic skills to read Help Wanted ads and you find yourself a job. You are not entitled to employment and an income just because you have a pulse.
Nobody owes you anything. You want something, you do what you have to do to achieve it, within the bounds of society’s laws. If you’re unable to find and/or hold a job, maybe that’s modern Darwinism at work. I’ve been getting up between 5 and 6 in the morning for more years than I can count in order to have a house and a car and food on the table and other things I want. When I didn’t have a job, I did what I had to do to get one. When I had a crappy job, I did what I had to do to get a better one. When one job didn’t pay enough, I got a second job. And if my job disappeared tomorrow, I’d figure out what I need to do to survive, even if it involved menial labor. That’s what being a responsible adult is all about.
No.
But with that said, Isamu does have a point. So, no, you are not owed a job, but freedom from restrictions to alternatives to working for a living, maybe. Like opening up vast tracts of fallow government-owned land to homesteading maybe. Or being able to volunteer for medical experiments/new surgeon training aides in exchange for a decent wage.
Apart from that, though, nope. Freedom is good with limits, but at some point everyone else is owed either your absence or participation.
Owed, no. But it is reasonable to expect that there is something you can do (legally) to get the money to pay for what you need. There is also no guarantee that someone will help you find that task.
My first thought was, “Owed by whom?” We’re not owed anything unless there is somebody who is fo some reason obligated to give it to us. Since I can’t think of who else’s responsibility it would be to give me a job and/or income, I’d say no.
But after reading posts like Isamu’s, I’m inclined to change my mind. In a primitive society, if I needed to support myself, I could just go out into the forest and hunt, or gather roots and berries, or stake out a plot of land and grow some crops. But if someone has cut down all the forests and bought up all the land, I no longer have that option. And so, whoever takes away the means by which people might otherwise have supported themselves, could be said to owe them at least some chance of making a living.
Owed? No. However, our society by its nature is obligated to provide opportunities for work/income.
No.
I’m in the temp (staffing) business and have years of personal experience on this. It’s standard proceedure to assign 20-25% more people than actually needed for any given job. This is the typical percentage of no-shows. It’s not complicated to find and keep a job. If a person shows up and try a little he/she can have a job. If a person puts in some effort and gets along with others, he/she can move up. I’ve seen this first hand too many times to believe otherwise.
No.
We should have the chance at getting one, though, which implies access to education, health care, etc. But we still need to go and get it.
Owed? No. But for a society to really work, you have to look at the flip side of the equation. If people, particularly young males, cannot get work or eat, then they will generally find a way to get money and eat. In our society that tends to result in crime. In societies with a larger unemployed or underemployed segments of the population this can result in nastier things, like insurrection and religious extremism.
In other words, if there are just no jobs and no way to take care of myself or my family, then what’s yours is mine if I can get it. So blame unemployment on the unemployed all you wish. There are certainly malingerers out there, but economic theory tells us that full employment is essentially impossible in a free market society. So you will have unemployed people. Without some sort of social net for those people then we WILL have problems.
Wow…I thought I was the only one that ever threw up that argument.
Back when I was younger (and much more socialist) I used this argument and people would just look at me like I was insane. If I had no job and couldn’t get one then I should be able to go into a forest and cut down trees and build myself a house. The problem being that someone owns the trees and if I tried to put up a shelter then it would be on someones property and they would force me to move or the government wouldn’t let me etc.
So, the only way I can provide shelter and food for myself is to work…but I can;t find work (for whatever reason) AND I am not allowed to find other ways to do this than work…this is not ‘right’. Therefore, each citizen is owed minimal food and shelter.
No. The world doesn’t owe you jack-shit.
No. We’re all here by a chance of nature. It may not even be possible to give everyone a good job.
That said, we can see the dire consequences of people living in poverty, both to themselves and to the society in which they live. No one is owed anything, but if someone wants to be a productive member of society, we should fight as hard as we can to help them. It’s in everyone’s best interest.
Neither. Even without access to resources as in Isamu’s idealized situation, no one is born with assets nor any contract or promise of income or assets. Some societies endeavor to increase stability by providing for basic needs, but the concept of being “owed” or “entitled” to those services or opportunities is an entirely artificial construction of law, in those societies where it exists at all.
I’m actually pretty sympathetic to this argument. The problem is, it’s way more complicated than “someone else owns the land, so they and the government keep me from being able to support myself.” You COULD subsist that way, you just have to own the land you do it on. And I don’t see any way not to have land ownership, because having a free-for-all out there, with people trying to subsist on land that doesn’t belong to anyone would be trouble for our society…the population is too dense for us to do it that way any longer. What would you do if you were subsisting on some great piece of land, and others wanted to come along and take advantage of it, too? You’d either have to move on, or you’d have to defend it some how. If it happened enough times, you’d end up defending it…and the next thing you know…land ownership!
You are born a free human being, like everyone else. You are not ‘owed’ a job, because there was no one else born indentured to you. Jobs are offered by other humans for their own reasons. By saying you are owed one, you are saying that other members of society are obligated to give you their own money and have no choice in the matter.
Now, a modern society generally finds, as a practical matter of good governance, that it’s smart to provide some basic level of support to the poorest people to avoid civil disruption and a breakdown of civil society. So some level of basic welfare or support is pretty common.
The big danger in that is precisely what this thread is about - the growing belief that the poor are ‘owed’ a living by society. This is a moral hazard, in that it creates a culture of dependency and an attitude among the poorest that since they are owed a living, they don’t need to work for one. Or that since they are guaranteed a job, they don’t have to take the steps necessary to become really employable. This is not good for society either, so there’s definitely a trade-off here. That’s why any kind of social welfare or social mandate needs to be kept as small as possible, with an eye towards maintaining proper incentives as much as possible.
No.