Iron Chef Olorinus wrote:
Well Gbaji we are all cultured by our experiences.
I was in the care of the director at age of majority. In plain talk, that means that the state was my legal guardian.
So what you see as interventionalism that undermines equality, I see as necessary supports helping people such as my child-self escape harmful environments and access knowledge. I see it as the state filling in the gaps in community that have been created by this accidental explosion of civilization.
Do you think children who are subject to the predatory impulses or ineptness of the adults in charge of them should not be given the chance to thrive?
This is a completely different issue. I'm talking about supporting adults who aren't able to obtain jobs to support themselves. That's not even remotely the same as providing housing and shelter for children who's parents have died, abandoned them, or are unfit.
My argument is that by "helping" poor people to have housing and food and whatnot even though they aren't earning enough to obtain those things for themselves, we ultimately create the very conditions of poverty itself. Social programs tend to work best when those in need of them are nearby. It's just more cost effective to help a thousand people all living in tenements within a 2 block radius of the government hand-out office than if they're spread around. As a result, you end out over time creating concentrations of people living on the dole in areas in which there are not sufficient jobs to employ them even if they wanted to.
This process effectively creates urban prisons which are just as real as any other prison. The bars aren't there physically, but it's just as hard to escape.
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And how many poor home environments are because of the involuntary poverty thrust upon families who are sacrificed to the kind of social darwinism you propose?
Far far fewer than are created via the process of trying to prevent that darwinistic process. Absent that social service "help", you don't get that same amount of concentration of poverty in single areas. It's pretty easy to see this if you think about it. Imagine that 15% of your population is "poor". If that 15% is concentrated in areas, so that 100% of those living in those areas are poor, you've effectively removed any chance of the people living there ever improving their lot in life. And you'd done the same for their children as well.
Spread that same 15% among the rest of the population and they're surrounded with opportunity. They wont all succeed, but at least they'll have a chance. Each individual has a chance at success. They aren't just lumped in with the group called "poor" and left to a miserable existence on public assistance.
It's that lack of opportunity which causes the sorts of desperation and despair which in turn leads to riots of this sort. Those people just don't care because they don't believe that they can improve their lives, so why bother trying? Surely you can see that concentration of that sort also makes rioting like this happen. Riots require high concentrations of people all feeling the same thing. They can congregate to riot, but it's particularly easy when everyone in your neighborhood is in the same crappy situation you are in, right?
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You talk about families cultured by the dole, but you don't talk about what perpetuates the dole. It is not plutocrats who are taxed too much, it is an uncaring and ridiculously unequal society which stacks the deck against the vast majority of the population and then invents myths to explain why they are downtrodden.
A free market stacks the deck against no one though. It rewards effort and skill. It's only when we start applying alternative social agendas that we start stacking the deck against groups of people. I just honestly can't see how any amount of racism in the free market (for example) could be more effective at limiting the outcomes of minorities than modern liberal social policies do. Feel free to make a case otherwise, but the evidence is pretty overwhelming.