Ah, yes, Horatio Alger’s Law. Thank heavens we don’t have to do anything!
Confidential to T.B.: I didn’t say every middle-class person believes this. But I don’t doubt the number of poors who also believe these premises is lower (and it’s less pernicious, since poors don’t get much of a say in how things are run). Interestingly, most rich people I’ve known don’t tend to go in for the “screw the poor” rhetoric (in fact, they tend to be the types working at Serious Think Tanks and NGOs they produce earnest reports on the plight of the disadvantaged). Maybe they believe similar things, but, as with all things rich-people, the expression is much more elegant.
But my main defense is this: no matter how you slice it, middle-class people aren’t the victims here. Let’s not pretend that they are.
As they told the counterculture type back in the 1960s who was determined to practice Hindu meditation techniques while living off the land in a national park, “The Ranger ain’t gonna like that, yogi.”
As far as I’m concerned, while the courts have held the draft, being for national defense, not to be a case of involuntary servitude, the sort of proposal contemplated by the OP, not being for national defense but explicitly “to make them pay for their (presumed) benefits”, flies in the face of the 13th Amendment.
And under my ethics, if we as a nation once decide that “they” have to do something (whoever “they” may be) because it matches “our” social policy, the first thing that should be done is to require those who propose it to themselves undergo it. In the instant case, for example, Kearsen should be compelled to serve military service. (And this is not a personal remark directed at Kearsen or an argumentum ad personam, but rather the particularization to this specific case to the contrapositive of the Golden Rule: “Whatsoever you would not be willing that others do unto you, do not do that thing unto others.”
