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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (92223)	10/28/2008 9:55:30 AM
From: Mary Cluney	Respond to of 541582

<<< If individuals, communities, or states want to set poor people up in mansions with their own private doctors, chefs, and personal shoppers, fine.>>> OOOOOAAAAH! I am so scared.

To: Lane3 who wrote (92223)	10/28/2008 10:06:04 AM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541582

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.

To: Lane3 who wrote (92223)	10/30/2008 7:27:55 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541582

Re: Social Security" I see that it's a good deal for the beneficiaries. How so? When you consider the payments they made in, and the time value of money, and the risk that they may die before getting any payments, I'm not so sure its such a good deal for someone starting to receive now. When you consider the problems of the affordability of the program in the future, its even less likely to be a good deal for those who still have to pay for decades before they get any benefits. (and yes I know SS disability payments can come much earlier, I know someone well under retirement age who receives such payments, but that's a relatively small part of the program, and not what I'm talking about, even if SS disability insurance is a good deal in general, that doesn't say anything about taxes and benefits from the SS retirement program) So, you "see" it. If you "see" it, where did it come from? What is the basis for it? Or did you just make it up out of whole cloth? What else do you "see." What about food and clothing and recreation? Lotsa human needs. Companionship? How about sex? Why is there a right of citizenship to be provided with one and not the others? Great point.