I'm not sure I'm willing to engage in much back and forth with you, honestly, I'm finding your positions very repulsive these days. Definitely damping my interest in even reading the site.
The state can can treat his addiction.
Can it? I'm not aware of any addiction treatment that can be forced on a person and be effective. I've been involved with drug addition treatment programs linked to welfare and honestly, you're lying to yourself. Government can't fix addition in isolation from completely fixing poverty and completely "fixing" the motivations of everyone who's a user. The incentives to use are too high.
Indeed, that's why making treatment available was only part of my answer, where I thin also proceeded to suggest that we remove the effects of poverty from the equation.
Still not enough, you actually have to change people as well. There is no system that can protect people from the consequences of bad decisions other than one that takes away their decisions.
Of course its worse than that, because most of what you advocate, goes beyond protecting people from consequence on to full on enabling them to make worse decisions. There is no fix for poverty that comes from handouts, that's mitigation not cure. And its a mitigation that increases the incidence of poverty.
A huge fraction of them. The money exists if we will it to exists,. We have the resources to do it, it's only spite that keeps us from employing them by intentionally restricting the supply of money such that so many people who need them can afford them (and similarly that so many people who could have jobs providing them, instead have to remain unemployed and impoverished instead)
No it's not spite, its the FACT that no country on Earth operates its economy or handles its money supply consistent with your pet theory. Money is not an unlimited resource for any entity, including the entity that prints it.
It's quite simply false to claim that we have the resources to do so. We are chronically undersupplied in the types of care givers that are required to provide this kind of support. It's also incredibly inefficient to spend the resources of multiple people to confront and correct for the poor decisions of a single individual. It's demeaning and dehumanizing to take away such persons ability and right to make their own decisions.
And, contrary to your assertion, the state already provided educational opportunities to everyone in the country directed at exactly what you claim needs to be done. They provide public education for every individual through 12th grade, and for anyone impoverished its trivial to obtain the financing necessary to continue their education through college. That's handed to everyone. What exactly are you proposing that is different? Another school that people who chronically make bad choices will suddenly decide to make good choices and partake in?
We are a people with a huge prison population and a large portion of our public impoverished. None of them are free.
Interesting lumping there. People in prison are, for the most part, there as a consequence of their own decisions. Freedom is not freedom from consequence, its freedom to make a good or bad decision in the first place.
There is absolutely nothing about being impoverished that implies you lack freedom. You lack resources and opportunity, but that's not the same thing. You like to pretend it is, because that's a social science short cut to change the terms of what's being discussed, so you can turn something that isn't a right into a discussion about rights without actually having to make an argument.
Poor people have freedom. They exercise it everyday, with many many choices.
I'm not proposition "living anyone's live" for them I'm proposing that we ensure that everyone has the basic resources _needed to be free_ in the first place, rather than forcing so many people to live in debt and wage slavery because we'd rather punish and control them for being poor than risk that they might choose to do things that people like you don't approve of them doing.
Nice combination of a strawman and a false dichotomy there.
No one's using force. No one is stuck with a choice between debt and wage slavery and being given free stuff, and certainly not as a form of punishment and control.
In fact, in this country, we go out of our way to give people the resources they need to thrive. No one is born with a marketable skill (okay maybe a few baby models), they have to learn them and practice them, and we give people free education to do that, but we don't force them to use it. We have some of the best income mobility in the world.
Even the words you use are a lie. Working for a living is not the same as wage slavery. Wage slavery used to really exist, coal miners were paid in company scrip that was only good at the company store, which meant they could neither save nor ever leave. Getting paid in cash today, and getting paid in benefits if you don't make enough cash is in no way wage slavery. Even the whole idea of every job deserving a "living wage" is utter nonsense.
I do tend to agree that debt policy has been designed to enslave us all. I think that falls into the category of a broken clock being right twice a day.
We, as a society/community, require people to find employment in order to support themselves. If we are going to enforce that requirement then we are obligated to ensure that there is sufficient employment for all people to be able to support themselves.
Which is only a partial truth. There is also a reciprocal truth that people have an obligation to actively train themselves for the jobs and lifestyle they want. There is no obligation to create jobs for those who chose to be unskilled that pay them the wages that they would like. Jobs are not entitlements, they are activities that need to be done and that someone is willing to pay to have done, period.
The state can't do any of that, unless you're going to put a mind control chip in him.
Sure it can. I detailed how it could above.You seem to be so lost in an obsession with forcing people to live by your dictates to honestly respond to suggestions that we empower people to be able to make better choices on their own accord by providing them the resources and support needed to do so.
The state already provides every citizen with the resources and support to improve their lives and get ahead. Your argument is premised on the idea that your new initiatives will make a difference where existing ones have not, and you claim somehow that we're trying to force our ideals on people by not agreeing that even more resources won't work. Your whole plan fails because you have to rely on people taking advantage of the opportunity to improve themselves, and while some will a not insignificant number won't (which is in part why we are where we are now). So long as the remainder exists, and it always will, your philosophy only has one answer, throw more opportunities at them.
It's the opposite of efficiency to throw more resources at the worse performers.
He's not pursuing rational or profitable crime, I agree with you he's most likely mentally ill, he could be involuntarily committed and kept there until is proven he can rejoin society (the treatment statistics mean effectively its a life sentence).
Perhaps, if that can be proven, and he repeatedly declines treatment when he's free to obtain it. That's moot so long as we deny him access to care by not ensuring he has the resources needed to afford and use it in the first place.
It's not moot at all. It's just a fact, his crimes are neither rational or profitable, they reflect a fundamental flaw in his decision making. It is not okay to leave him in society as is.
Therefore incarceration, or if you prefer treatment until his fundamental flaw is gone, which again is likely to be never. If you can't posit a solution that stops him from harming society, you're just standing on a soap box and blowing smoke.
Everything else is not actually its job, its things we can choose to do, but by no means an obligation.
The state exists to provide a communal decisionmaking process to help us coordinate our efforts for survival, growth, and prosperity.
Really? Care to quote that part of the Constitution?
The state exists to preserve our rights, period.
It does not exist
to provide a communal decision making process. That's just a process not a reason.
It does not exist to coordinate our efforts for survival, growth or prosperity. It does exist to provide for our common defense and security, which sounds similar enough that its easy for you to twist the meaning.
If it is forcing people to live in conditions that aren't well above the baseline standard that they could manage purely on their own- including failing to transmit the survival skills needed, such that they're fully dependent on society for survival, then it's failing in its most fundamental purposes, and it's little wonder that people are pushed to violate its rules to try to find their own way to improve themselves.
Since that isn't its purpose its not a failing if it failed to do so.
That said, there is virtually no American for whom its true that they are not living above the baseline standard they could manage on their own. In a state of anarchy, most of the people in this country would be slaves of one bully or another. They wouldn't have property. There plenty of countries on earth that demonstrate exactly this principal, last I checked you thought we should take in more refugees from them so you must be aware of them.
Your position puts a nice gloss on the idea that because other people have more, poor people are entitled to take it. But that's all it is. Naked redistribution.
