I owe you the responsibility of not throwing you under the bus for my own benefit. I expect you to act like a civilised human being and return the favour.
If you don’t regard other people’s lives as being of value, how is that “civilized”? And if being “civilized” means dying of starvation or disease, why is it of value? All you are doing is arguing that ruthlessness is only acceptable if it’s by the prosperous against the less prosperous. The less prosperous are on the other hand supposed to just sit in a corner and die quietly.
Right. If you take the OP’s metaphor too far, then you take the sick fish out of the tank and flush them down the toilet. If society is an organism (at least metaphorically speaking), shouldn’t we kill off the parasites and cut out the cancerous tumors?
That said, though, the OP’s “Having a certain degree of misery among us is a bad thing for all of us, not just the miserable” is a very good point, and I fully agree. Some people are just too short-sighted or self-preoccupied to see or care about this. Some think of society as a zero-sum game, where less for you means more for me. Some think of life as a competition, where seeing other people less well off than they proves that they’re winning. Some have a very individualistic viewpoint and highly value each person’s freedom to control their own resources. Some think that some people can’t be helped, at least not until or unless they take responsibility for themselves, so why waste valuable resources trying?
But also, a lot of people oppose “Universal Health Care,” not in principle, but in implementation. That is, they fully agree that it’s a bad thing that people go without health care; they just disagree about how to fix this, and are afraid that trying to give health care to everyone could, if we’re not careful, result in adequate health care for no one.
That crackhead is a tax collector for the state, because of him the state can justify taking much of the people’s money and resource to supposedly help (and look like the good guy) the crackhead, though what makes it to the crackhead is actually very little - barely enough to live, while the state employees live pretty good with some of the best benefits and job security.
IMHO the world system is shit rolls down hill, the people at the bottom have no where to roll the shit onto (except God and some find that way), so they turn to drugs or other to help deal with the pain. People at higher levels see no reason to change the system so even though they can most don’t.
Your premise is extremely flawed and simplistic. The reason that some people are sick or poor or have inadequate access to health care is not “because people are mean”. We don’t live in a fish tank in the sense that resources are distributed equally and homogeniously across the tank. Some people have access to more and others have less. Society attempts to create mechanisms for people to distribute and exchange resources but people don’t necessarily agree with how those mechanisms should work.
How much should people give back to society?
Should people be forced to give back to society and how much?
What should be done about people who refuse to work? People who want to but can’t work?
How do you reward innovation and hard work without overly punishing the poor and stupid?
What rights do people have and how do you protect them?
What are the unintended consequences of providing these services in terms of disincentives, inefficiencies and other hidden costs?
How much do you take into account that a certain amount of success is due to luck and being in the right place at the right time?
Who should destribute these resource and how?
I grew up very poor. My father came to this country from El Salvador, with nothing.
And yet he never had the view that merely because he needed help, he was entitled to have things taken from other people and given to him.
So: no. it’s perfectly possible to need help and still not believe you’re somehow entitled to take, or be given, what you need.
This argument, & Social Darwinism generally, has been used to justify some pretty dangerous practices–including some that failed to nourish a fit society, but instead sowed the seeds of the social order’s destruction.
A pragmatic plan for survival of the fittest, by contrast, looks to long-term sustainability & co-opts the socialist movements if necessary.
In other terms: Call people “slow antelopes” & they’ll help Robespierre behead you in the street. But give them security & membership in the in group, & you’ve subverted them; they may be willing to die for your causes, even the abstruse ones.
I point this out as a former Malthusian who learned to make the Green bargain: Socialism may give us the power to build sustainability. (Dispossession of the masses, alternatively, might just inspire revolt & the destruction of all sustainable systems of power.)
Er, you realize we don’t have a pure meritocracy now, right? And not all capitalist systems are meritocratic, & not all swells are tides.
“The only thing that protects them is the assumption that we’re sane…”
I’ve mentioned this before. You know how they say the tree of liberty is nourished by the blood of patriots & tyrants? That’s actually historopolitically simplistic, but to the degree it’s true, it’s not just liberty.
As Hilaire Belloc pointed out, if enough regular people are devoid of property, decent Christian people stop seeing property crimes as wrong.
Yeah, the social contract is a pragmatic thing, really. Also, we pragmatically want to encourage a deep-seated moral belief in its ethic to make it stronger, even if that’s nourished by superstition & delusion. The side-effect of this is that clever adolescents see through the lies of superstition & delusion, & think they’ve got it all figured out. Some never outgrow that.
You phrase this as if you think it’s a self-evident truth. In fact, this is one of the core questions of political philosophy: What is the nature of the social contract?
Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that man in a society derived his freedom from being part of a social group. To enter society is to surrender all your freedom to the society, in return for which you will receive your share of the social wealth, and you will actually maximize your freedom because all others will give up theirs as well, and the result will be more equality with rights being granted equally by society and not on the basis of unequal traits, and by this means you’ll have true freedom.
The other side of the philosophical coin is John Locke. Locke argued that men have intrinsic rights and that they are not born into a social group, but are born as free beings with rights, and that the proper social contract has as its purpose the protection of those rights. Rather than surrendering to a social group, Locke’s vision of man is that of free people bartering with each other and respectful of each other’s right to property and self-determination, giving up only those rights that would inflict harm on others in return for others doing the same.
If you’re a Democrat, you probably like Rousseau. If you’re a Republican or a Libertarian, you probably like Locke.
This is the real source of the partisan divide, and it’s been going on for hundreds of years. Republicans vs Democrats is only the latest manifestation of it.
Nature blows.
It’s basically individualism vs collectivism. How do you encourage and reward those with exception skill and ability without excluding those who don’t? And how do you provide for the common good without dragging down and demotivating those who are exceptional?
But obviously he benefited from just that, or he’d have died poor and you’d be in a slum somewhere and not a lawyer, assuming you didn’t starve to death as a child. Because that’s what happens to poor people in a society where “nothing is taken” from the wealthier.
Nonsense. The utter ruthlessness, the need to control others, the disdain for the lives and welfare of others, the lack of concern for the general welfare or the future are the hallmark of the Right; not any concern for the rights of individuals much less any respect for freedom. THAT is the reason the partisan divide is so large. It isn’t anything about the Republicans favoring individual rights and freedom; they have nothing but contempt for individual rights and freedom.