We definitely need to encourage productivity and self-reliance, but we also have to realize that not everyone is as capable as the next, and it is a humane and just society that seeks to help everyone to become the best that they can be.
It’s also important to realize that there will always be an underclass. Even if one were to kill every single “freeloader” today, in ~10 years, we’d have a new crop of “freeloaders.” That’s what you get with heterogeneous societies and bell curves. Welfare isn’t for the poor, it’s for the rich. Without some way of providing for at least the basic necessities, if there is a tremendous amount of wealth at the top, the poor will rise up and take what they want, however they need to do it. There is ample historical evidence to show how this happens, almost without exception.
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I agree that there will always be a bell shaped curve in which there’s a top 20% a bottom 20% and a range in between. That’s just always going to be the way it is with any size population. In your own social group you can probably identify the top 20% and the bottom 20% pretty easily, even if that social group contains mostly people in the top 20%. Providing the necessities of life is fairly cheap (Shelter, Food, Clothing). There’s billions of people that survive with basic necessities on less than a couple dollars a day. It’s trying to provide our increasing expectations of a middle class lifestyle for that bottom 20% that gets hard and more expensive.
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Again, I have very little problem with truly productive people making lots of money if they are the ones who personally created all the value and did so in a way that didn’t take advantage of, nor exploit, others. Very few rich people got there without stepping on others, and very few made it entirely on their own. I abhor when these people then try to frame the issue as “the lazy, freeloading poor” (usually those who’ve been stepped on) vs. “the deserving, productive, hard-working rich.” It’s very rarely that clear-cut.[/quote]
Well if you step on people and exploit them then you’ve likely committed some crime. Fraud is a crime that nearly all of the rich bankers should be prosecuted for. The one real problem with our version of capitalism is that those with the most money get to circumvent the laws in place. It’s not really capitalism that’s a problem it’s an inability to apply to laws equally depending on social status. There’s countless examples of celebrities and wealthy individuals getting off of crimes that any normal person would be locked up for. Equality under the rule of law is really the solution.
