MattShizzle wrote:I mean the words "personal responsibility" are the mantra of the right wing. They not only use it to blame the victim when it comes to poverty
No, they use it to assign responsibility. Who but the individual who makes choices in life is responsible for their choices but that individual? Whether one is a "victim" or is "to blame" for one's economic condition can be an exceedingly complex and highly individualized question not amenable to pat answers. But the RESPONSIBILITY for dealing with life as it presents itself in one's life is directly and only that of the individual so affected. To say otherwise is to imply that someone else, or society, is responsible for the economic success of a particular individual, which of course is nonsense. It's also bad public policy to relieve individuals of responsibility for their actions because doing so leads directly to their becoming part of the dependent class who expect others to support and care for them even when the consequences they are suffering under are entirely their own fault and are the result of bad decision making, selfishness, laziness or other character defects that are magnified and exacerbated by government welfare programs and services that relieve people of the direct unpleasant consequences of making bad decisions. People don't learn to make good decisions unless they are allowed to experience the negative effects of making bad ones. Every parent knows this important lesson as it applies to children, and adults are little different.
A person may not be "to blame" for his poverty, but creating and sanctioning dependency on government by providing too many benefits to the poor has the practical effect of enslaving them to the dependent class. That's exactly what happened with "welfare" AKA Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) beginning in the 1960s. Generations of mostly black and other minorities were enslaved to the welfare system. President Clinton reformed the system in 1994, and that reform has been a smashing success in breaking the chains of generational welfare dependency, mostly by making people suffer the consequences of sloth and idleness and rewarding them when they apply themselves and seek to actively improve their economic and social conditions.
The fact that the "right wing" points out the nature of the relationship between government largess and artificially-sustained welfare dependency and suggests that allowing people to suffer the consequences of dependency and sloth is the very best way to encourage and stimulate them to work hard to improve their economic condition and social status.
This is hardly a new or novel concept. Ben Franklin famously opined much the same thing in 1766:
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
* On the Price of Corn and Management of the Poor[5] (29 November 1766)
but the suppository-faces who are anti-abortion use it to.
What's so irrational about saying "if you have unprotected sex, and get pregnant, you are no longer the only person who will be affected by your decisions and society has an interest in protecting (at some point) the life inside you that you voluntarily participated in the creation of?"
Why should a woman who voluntarily has sex and gets pregnant be legally relieved of the natural, expected, normal consequences of the decisions that led to pregnancy? What is your argument in favor of public policy that provides such relief from personal responsibility? Why should society not simply say "if you don't want to get stuck gestating a child to term, then don't have irresponsible sex?"
I don't think extreme poverty should be used to hang like the sword of Damocles over peoples' heads to keep them enslaved to the Capitalist system.
How do you distinguish between "poverty" and "extreme poverty" and why are you moving the goalposts?
I don't see Capitalism as much, if any, better than slavery.
If this is true, which I doubt, then you are an idiot and blind to boot. The difference is obvious. In slavery, one is held in involuntary servitude by force. Under capitalism, anyone is free to improve their own economic condition by virtue of hard work and innovation at any time they choose, and they can work, or not work, as it pleases them to do so.
How is "work a rotten job for bad pay or starve/be homeless" any better than "do this work or be beaten/killed?"
False dilemma fallacy. Those are hardly the two polar-opposite choice that anyone faces under capitalism.
Frankly I'd rather be dead than homeless or doing a shit job like fast food.
Feel free to step outside and slit your belly at any time. Your statement is a PERFECT example of the sort of arrogance and selfishness that the dependent class uses as an excuse to avoid hard work and self-improvement, and it's exactly why we should NOT support the dependent class in their indolence and sloth.
If you don't want to work a shit job like "fast food" in order to pay your way through life, then you deserve to be homeless and starving, and I certainly have no interest in assisting you to improve your economic condition even if you should ask for help, because you're unworthy of my labor and property. The world (which is comprised of hard-working people who have a right to enjoy the fruits of THEIR labor without your using government to steal it from them) doesn't owe you a damned thing.
Adapt or die.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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