Sorry, not quite sure of your point, are you suggesting that in Brazil, India and Africa the government takes care of the parentless children and mentally ill?
No, I was using them as examples of how they are taken care of with little or no government intervention, which is to say, not very well.
You weren't able to give me an example of a place that actually has this worked out well without the government intervention? I'm sure someone has it worked out somewhere. Maybe some small Islands in the Pacific?
Oh I take it back, you refer to the past. our social structure has changed so much we can't go back to the way it used to be So are you saying we had it put together somewhere in history? When exactly and where? I honestly don't know what period you are talking. As far as I know, pretty much as long as history has been recorded, children have lived on the street somewhere in the world (maybe they were better off....who is to say?). I'm really not saying that the government has the best solution, in the old days the church worked pretty well. The extended family worked pretty well. Both of those things have declined in importance in modern life. Some people would say that they have declined in direct relationship to how much the government has grown, certainly I can't argue with that opinion.
You perhaps have more faith in the good nature of people in a collective sense than I do. Maybe I've been up close and personal with the horrible things that people do to one another to trust that they would come through. I sure as hell don't trust the church because I've been up close and personal there as well(recovering Catholic and I lived with more than one pastor's family growing up).
When I think of this country's past I remember pictures of young children working in spinning mills from around the turn of the century. Not unlike the stories we hear coming out of the sweat shops of third world countries today. Do I have to go back further to before the industrial revolution? Agrarian societies are by far the best at taking care of their own, perhaps because children are considered an asset rather than a liability. But we don't have that society anymore, not here.
Every step of the way money leaks out, to pay for the multitudinous layers of bureaucracy, and I think that stinks.
I absolutely agree with you here. I have no love of the government, they make a pretty poor substitute for parents and they are absolutely terrible money managers.
But I recognize that you've been fed that line all your life, and haven't learned to see it for what it is, a cynical, calculated justification for preservation of the status quo, which benefits, not homeless children, but hungry bureaucrats.
Don't make the mistake that people make all the time with me, thinking that because I was brought up by the state that somehow I can't see what is inherently wrong with the system. I had a pretty intimate view of it early on and found myself ditching it at the earliest possible moment. I certainly don't advocate it's extension. My contention is that while, in theory, you may in fact be right that people would act locally to deal with social problems if there was no government intervention, I don't see that it has happened on a large scale in any country. It does work on a small scale in closed homogenous societies like, for instance, the Amish in Pennsylvania (but then they just have a more local government that is church based). It doesn't seem to work for those people that are deemed outside of the community somehow. Correct me if you know I'm wrong, tell me where it has worked in a technologically advanced society that is culturally diverse. |
