You still haven't articulated what the collective good is.
Ah, I can just hear your foot going down hard with that one. Of course, you don't see a greater good since you start and end with the individual. But individuals are only able to survive in a sea of collective goods--family, community, state, etc. Everything from security or lack thereof, to food, to health, you name it. Best to think of it as a tension between the two, sometimes a healthy one, sometimes a destructive one.
What you don't consider is that you may be ironically producing greater suffering later on if you undermine the notions of property rights, individual responsibility and initiative, pride of accomplishment, and personal generosity. That is too high a price to pay.
It's genuinely hard to see how providing a decent safety net (use that as a basket for a host of things) goes any serious distance toward all those terrible consequences you enumerate. So making certain a single mother with small kids receives health insurance undermines "notions of property rights, individual responsibility and initiative, pride of accomplishment, and personal generosity." I do have a very large grin on my face given that hyperbole.
Just to get back to the basics, a society which reduces poverty among the elderly, which insures that all its citizens have health insurance at reasonable costs, which provides a safety net for citizens who can't work, and which, most of all, provides as much equality of opportunity as possible (good schools are the essentials) is far better than one that doesn't. Everyone within it is better off. |
