Tell them that they’ve never been poor either (assuming that they haven’t) so therefore they aren’t allowed to have any opinion on it. Furthermore you (I assume) believe that the end of these welfare programs will lead to a better standard of life for these people, so therefore it is they who are unkind.
They’ve never been soldiers, politicians, doctors, professors policemen, foreigners, or a animals so therefore they are not allowed to have opinions upon any of these things, and only those who have been a soldier, politician, teacher, policeman, doctor, foreign, or an animal can have an opinion on any of these. Indeed Obama cannot touch the welfare system, he cannot command any of the troops in the entirety of the United States, he cannot support medical reform, he cannot support education reform, he cannot pass law enforcement standards, he cannot have a foreign policy, and he cannot do anything about the environment because he has never been any of these things. The only thing that president Obama can do under the criteria set by those whom you are debating, is to be a politician, and not do anything that effects anyone.
Also, inheritance is a voluntary transfer of property, not a forced transfer of property. You do not oppose voluntary welfare, you encourage it.
Welcome to Germany America, my friend. Where being against the welfare state makes you a cruel human being (forget the fact that I have volunteered hundreds of hours of my time though).
However, it’s funny here in America where certain people want welfare cut but nothing else. People generally don’t realize how much monetary capital our military consumes. If you are against the warfare state in America, you’re anti-American and you want to “gut” the military.
But then again, the poulace here doesn’t care how many young Americans come back in body bags or maimed. Forget the fact that so many foreign lives have also been claimed because of the Military Industrial Complex.
Maybe I can’t define myself as being poor but when I where younger and lived with my mother we probably had less then 50$ to spend after paying rent and bills each month. I don’t know if that is much money in America but in Sweden it’s not enough to even buy food for a week so we constantly had to rely on family and friends to survive. Remember this is in Sweden, which at the time had the highest taxes in the world but I’m pretty sure we would have been much better of if they didn’t take ~60% of my mothers salary every month because you’re getting almost nothing back of that money.
LOL. Bucking up and finding a job when you’re homeless and hungry is hardly worthy of respect. I guess it’s like Kakugo noted, the difference between the shameless poor and the shameful poor.
Tom Woods has a great lecture on the failures of jobs and welfare programs: Wealth Redistribution, Domestic and International
Agreed. I, of course, oppose the welfare state, but can hardly say that it’s a priority in my view. (First thing I’d fix is education, it makes everything else possible to fix.) If I ran for office, I would not highlight welfare. It’s miniscule compared to what we transfer to corporations. In fact, it’s not really all that terrible to tax the ultra rich, considering that almost no people in that category earn their money anyway. (I’m an anarchist, I’m just saying it’s not really theft to take back what you gave to the billionaire.)
I’m always a little concerned when libertarians indiscriminately scold rich people. Let’s have a look at the Forbes list of billionaires. How did people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or Ingvar Kamprad not earn their money?
Warren Buffett, really? You have to ask if Warrenn Buffett made money politically? Since you asked, though, let’s look at IP, Government Employee’s Insurance Company, investing in gold while having the ear of the president vis a vis bailouts, and so on. Let’s look at exactly how his insurance companies benefitted from bailouts and monetary policy. Bill Gates - I’d suggest he’d make quite a bit less without IP laws, am I wrong?
Sure, let’s go down that list. Let’s see how many benefit from eminent domain, how many gained from bailouts and risk-taking behavior that they would not have taken without government protection, and so on.
Yes, they benefit, but I’m not particularly convinced that these are things they wouldn’t have in a free market. I don’t know that road owners would charge businesses for frontage, for instance. I do know that bailouts wouldn’t exist. But, moving further, these things are available to anyone who makes use of them. Bailouts and government protection - not to mention government contracts, having friends at the Defense Department, etc. are not. Mom and pop stores don’t have their friends go to war so that they can buy things from the mom and pop store. But, moving on:
Granting this, why would I particularly respect the current distribution of capital and income? If the current distribution rests on force, what’s wrong with changing it?
This tactic is a lot more subtle than I think you imagine it to be.
What they are implying through this is that your policies are not sympathetic to the hungry. Sadly a few people’s rhetoric lends towards the detachment towards less fortunate people’s problems. The point you need to make is that what you advocate is intended to eliminate involuntary poverty.
If you want to be a dick for fun, you can reply with something like “because my parents were functioning human beings”. To me this is similar to pretending to be racist when accused of being racist. It is kind of hilarious.
Also make sure to point out the as hom. It is hilariously transparent.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that discussion takes place on a discussion board. I’m asking a question about libertarianism. In general, most libertarians seem pretty attached to the position I’m asking about - yet the only defenses of it that have been forthcoming have been a shrug and a tautology. Does anyone have a defense of what is usually seen as the default libertarian position in our society? Maybe you do - since you’ve at least identified that you believe the current distribution to be correct. Why do you respect it?
Maybe I can clarify the question. Suppose a pickpocket has just taken Bob’s wallet. I think just about all of us here would agree, regardless of means, that the just response would be, in some way, that Bob should get his wallet back. No one here, I think, would say “we have to respect property rights, including the property rights of the pickpocket, so we can’t just go seizing wallets from pickpockets.” Correct me if I’ve gone wrong so far. What we have today, of course, is more complicated, and is ongoing, rather than a one-time event, but we’d expect most of the same principles to apply. Yet it seems that when the government steals and redistributes to crony capitalists, many of us hold that we have to respect property rights going forward, and can’t do much about the situation. This equates to refusing to return the wallet.
We have a society where half of our income is taken, and most of it goes to a few firms designing weapons. We have a multitude of laws funnelling money from our hands into that of corporations in a variety of ways - tariffs, direct transfers, IP, barriers to entry, the list goes on and on. We have drug laws enriching pharm companies. We libertarians oppose all this, and we want people to listen to us, to take us seriously, and to fix these problems. I don’t think it’s wrong to ask what we think ought to be done, and I don’t see defending the rights of the people who have been enriched by these laws to keep their ill-gotten gains as a good answer. Maybe it is - if it is, someone should have a defense of the current structure of capital ownership and property distribution.
Alan, I won’t pretend to be smart enough or knowledgeable enough to really answer this issue. But I will ask another question that immediately occurs to me:
How do you know who is holding a “stolen wallet” and who’s really earned most of their money? I mean even if someone might benefit by a few rules or regulations here or there, what if, for the most part, they’ve competed in the market and done quite well? How is anyone going to be smart enough to sift through all these rich people and say “you earned it but you didn’t?”
I’m sure some cases are pretty obvious, but there’s probably a lot of gray area here. Personally, I’d rather not open that can of worms. If that means some people don’t get their wallets back, so be it.
Side note: I have money, what if you found out that somewhere in my family’s history, we benefited from government assistance of even the smallest kind? Would you try to take my money from me?