Well, I think they answered. Another way to delineate this grey area could be to call it “inner strength”. There must be degrees of will power. There must be a point at either end where will fails. One man wallows in his own filth and begs pitifully for booze. Another can drink you under the table, and never regret it for a moment. One man is shot in the gut and drops dead. Another man can remain standing, take the gun, and kill his assailant. Now don’t mistake these as different theories. These scenarios just show degrees of will, at the ends of the scale.
I make my living by pandering to people’s impulses. I know how to perform, what kind of rythms, and chords to use to emote certain impulses. I can get people to drink more, and give me their money. If I thought I could influence them beyond their will however, it would be very arrogant and downright evil. It could be argued as evil anyway but I do so with some conscience. This is part of human nature and shows how there are both market forces that can affect it, and how it is a natural facet of culture.
This question of ghettos seems to be running into a circular reasoning. Basicly ghettos are only partly economic in nature. It is mostly cultural. This is based on ethnicity by definition. Ethnicity is deifined by the spelling of in individual’s nationality. If it ends in -an it is ethnic. If it ends in -ish it is not. So for instance African, Mexican, and Iranian are ethnic. English, Spanish, and Jewish are not.
There is where you start to sound very authoritarian and conservative, and you really shouldn’t be surprised that such a statement is going to raise some red flags for people. Who specifically is incapable of moral choice? You seem to be selecting cultural or racial or economic groups you don’t like, dehumanizing them and then proceeded to rationalize “removing them from free society”. Where does this fit into libertarianism?
Here’s the problem: the current system is not meritocratic, so it is fallacious to assume that all poor people are poor simply because of bad decisions, or that all rich people are rich simply because they are particularly productive or smart. The reality of the situation is more nuanced than that. The currently existing degree of wealth disparity is not the outcome of a free market but distortions of the market.
This “answer” just makes you look like some kind of racist or elitist who generalizes entire groups into a morally inferior category, doesn’t take environmental factors into account and makes causal conclusions from correlative data.
Some individuals, because of an elitist attitude, are slaves to their own pretense. They will sustain a negative net worth until the day they die. But they look wealthy, they act wealthy. They look down on the honest man who has a positive net worth and rides a bike to work.
So the cause is either economic or ethnic/bad decision-making by an affiliated group… Well the only way to test it out is to set up a free society. In a free society, poverty will still exist, but slums will not for the most part, if it is an economic problem. But, if slums are the results of races of people, for some reason, wanting to live hard, dangerous, violent, and poor lives, than “the hood” will still be up and running and just as wide spread as in the states.
My bet is still on economic, and if that makes me egalitarian than that makes those in opposition collectivist and probably racist too. But, just to be fair I won’t totally rule out the opinions of stranger, mmartillo, jon, and byzantine… But yea… seriously… You guys are totally wrong. lol.
It’s not a strawman, it’s the implication of the statements made. I’m having trouble getting people to understand that reductios are not strawmen. The person clearly implied that currently existing inequalities in wealth (perhaps including those between ethnic groups) are “natural”, based purely on merit. That’s simply not true when we take into account all of the market distortions involved.
But it wasn’t a reductio because nobody claimed that all inequalities were the result of nature as opposed to nurture. I believe the argument put forward by Byzantine and Stranger was merely that since government policies are natioal there must be some other cause of slums.
Not once did they dismiss government intervention as not having any effect whatsoever, merely that there must be other causes. Apparently you’re too egalitarian to accept this.
Of course. I’ve been in trailer parks where my host said he could not let me out of his sight.
But we’re both on the horns of the same dilemma: If low IQ causes squalor and violence, then why do a number of low IQ people nevertheless practice cleanliness and non-violence? If government policies cause squalor and violence, then why do some citizens practice cleanliness and non-violence and others do not? Stranger is the only one who has resolved this paradox: moral choice of the individuals involved. If you are saying that slum inhabitants have no moral choice, then it follows they are mere wards of those who do have the capacity for moral choice.
Actually, all you have to do is set up universal conditions and see how people respond. Again, given the universality of government anti-market policies, most people–even poor people–manage to lead peaceful and productive lives. What do they have that the violent and welfare-dependent minority do not?
If you persist in saying that the causes of violence and filth are environmental, i.e., government policy, you are denying that people have moral choice just as surely as the most dogmatic eugenicist.