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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (36301)	4/30/1999 12:17:00 AM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Oh, please, Blue! Anyone who pays $200,000 in taxes in a year can afford to live in a gated community. Certainly churches and charities have appealed publicly to the government because they don't feel they can totally support the underclass. Donations to food banks, for example, simply don't fill all the grocery bags for the people waiting in line. Or perhaps churches are another kind of mercenary endeavor, and all of them are simply lying to the rest of us. Do you think so? And surely you must know that a very small percentage of tax money goes to any kind of support for the poor. Now if you do not feel like paying for military defense, you could argue that you are being screwed, because that is where you are more likely to find your tax dollars . . . I guess a problem I have with libertarianism is that it is an essentially amoral way of looking at life. I don't feel good when babies and small children whose fate is utterly out of their control are starving. I think we can do better than that, and that in fact compassion and fairness are the very basis of a civilized society.

To: Ilaine who wrote (36301)	4/30/1999 12:48:00 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

No actually they couldn't provide for them. What is true is that society was not as bothered by squalid poverty as it is now. The evening news didn't go out and cover shanty towns and the homeless. If you do not believe this you need only look at pictures of the rural poor- both black and white, who were sharecroppers. Or talk to people living in the slums. My mother lived in a slum during the depression. There were no government handouts so she went hungry, she had no clothes and wore my grandmother's friends castoffs (which didn't fit her and gave her terrible problems. Since they had no money when she had a toothache she went to a dentist that pulled teeth without anesthesia. Now I am no fountain of generosity. But I do think that baselines need to be maintained to assure the younger generations do not grow up retarded from poor nutrition, or crippled by bad health care. But my government aid comes at a price. I say if you cannot take care of yourself, and you throw yourself on the mercy of the State, then the State has rights over you it does not have over citizens who pay their own way. The State has the right to require you to improve yourself. It has the right to insist that you eat properly, by issuing you healthy foods instead of cash. It has the right to prevent you from conceiving children while you require assistance. JMO