>>Neither the enlightening of the ignorant nor the enrichment of the poor is in your self interest.<<
Oh, good. I wanted to say that this is what libertarians believe but didn't want to offend.
And this is where I part company with the libertarians. Flats is right, there isn't a free market solution for taking care of the poor who don't have families, except "charity" - and charity may or may not be there, because it's voluntary.
And then we have to decide whether unadoptable children with no families, and old helpless people with no families, and so on, should just be left to die, or destroyed, or what?
Ayn Rand, for example, was an atheist, who did not believe in altruism - her beliefs were consistent with Social Darwinism, the belief that if you are on top of the heap, it's because you represent the best of all possible worlds. Many libertarians and libertarian-conservatives believe that if you assist the less fortunate, you are polluting the race by preserving the less fit.
It was a popular belief in the US a few decades ago. The well-respected Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote several famous U.S. Supreme Court opinons in favor of such things as government-mandated sterilization of retarded people, things we not only find shocking today, but have a hard time finding support for in the Constitution. But that's the way history goes. He also wrote opinions in favor of imprisoning anti-war demonstrators during WWI - one poor newspaper journalist went to prison for 10 years for writing op-ed pieces against the war. The Supreme Court - the liberal Warren court! - thought it was ok to put completely blameless Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during WWII.
And so, as Kurt Vonnegut said, it goes. |
