Belkira the Tulip wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Do we? What do those emergency funds actually pay for? Be specific.
Clean-up after a disaster. Food. Water. Temporary shelter. In some cases, permanent shelter. Relocation assistance.
So if my $400,000 home should be flattened in an earthquake, and I didn't pay for earthquake insurance, the government isn't going to build me a new home, or pay me for my loss?
Just checking.
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gbaji wrote:
No one else around you chose for you to have a diseased body either, though. So why should they pay for your body? I think the problem is you're looking at it backwards and trying to argue that anything that isn't your "fault" should be taken care of by someone else. The correct way of looking at it is that you are responsible for everything that affects you *except* those things that harm you and are the fault of someone else. We don't start with a base condition of being cared for and then take responsibility for just those things we caused. We start with a base condition of being responsible for ourselves and can only demand repayment/punishment of some kind for things other people do to us.
You're the one who brought choice into it, though. That we had the choice to insure our house or not.
That's incredibly muddled thinking. You're jumping from one thought to another without any coherent argument connecting them. We can play the game where I present a logical argument and you just randomly respond with "yeah, but what about...?" over and over, but this does get tiring after a point. You need to also provide some reason why the point you're mentioning has some relevance to the subject at hand, not just toss them out randomly.
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My only point is that one can choose whether or not to have a house, but not whether or not to have a diseased body. And if one has a diseased body, that, in turn, makes insuring said diseased body incredibly difficult. So, at what point do you, personally, decide that this person isn't worth living anymore? What point do we as a society decide that it sucks they have a disease and can't afford treatment, so they get to die?
We don't make that decision though. Again, you've got it backwards. No one made you get sick. We don't (or shouldn't) provide things for people just because they can't afford them. Like I said above, connect your words to a logical structure. What are you arguing for? Because it's not just about this case, is it? It's about all cases. What common pattern of action are you advocating, and what criteria are you saying we should use?
Should we provide anything for anyone if they can't afford it? Where are the limits? You mention an extreme (person with cancer), but what's the rule you are following here? Where's the cutoff? So we pay for cancer treatment, but not breast implants? What about cosmetic surgery? We can argue that if someone looks better they could get a better job, right? What about sex changes? Can't we argue for that as well?
What about non-medical things? Housing? Food? Clothing? Education? Transportation? Recreation? Where's the line there? Do you have one? And if you do, can you define it for me? Because you seem to argue based on a mish-mash of random cases strung together, all designed to generate emotional responses, but without ever even mentioning any sort of consistent criteria you're using. Can you do that?
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gbaji wrote:
If no one else is "at fault" for something that happens to you, then you're supposed to take care of it. That's the natural state of man.
Sure. I agree. To a point.
To what point? It seems to be that your point stops at the point someone can't afford to pay for it themselves. Which is kinda the same as saying that there isn't really a point or limit, right?
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When someone can't take care of it, what happens then? Again, when someone is so sick they can't afford to work, can't afford bloated insurance premiums, can't afford chemo therapy, you suggest that we let them die? Or does the government have some responsibility for the well being of it's citizens?
I don't know? Does it? Where does it say in the constitution that the government's job is to make sure no body dies? That seems kind of silly, doesn't it? How much money do you think the government must pay to try to prevent people from dying? There must be a limit, right? We only have so much money.
You're trying to make this into a morally black vs white argument, but the reality is that no matter what we do, there will be a point at which we must shut off the care. It gets too expensive in comparison to the returns. We see this in debates about pulling the plug on someone all the time, and if one discusses the issue of "death panels" in more than surface depth, it's there as well. Every health care system must at some point place limits on care. Government run systems are no different. You're limited by your money. If you don't have enough, you might not get the care you need, and that may result in your death. That's not changed with a government run system. The main difference is that the determinant of whether care is obtained isn't your own financial situation (which you have some control over), but government guidelines for care (which you have almost no control over).
Some people will die because they could have received more care but didn't because it was too expensive no matter what system we do. You can contrive the situation of a poor person who is denied life extending care because he can't afford it. I can contrive situations too. But there is no moral advantage of one over the other, despite how often it's argued this way.
There is, however, a liberty argument. In one, our own actions and decisions are the primary determinants of our outcomes. In the other, we're all thrown into a pot and get the same thing. Personally, I'll take the first option.
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You'd support pushing people out on the street with nothing? What a charitable guy you are...
I don't believe government should be involved in charity. We do have real charities who help people who've lost their homes. We really do not need big government programs to do this. Government is not very good at it anyway.
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No, I don't think I'm arguing for a slippery slope.
You are. When you argue for something in the form of "It's ok to do this because we already do that", you are arguing for a slippery slope. Which is what you did.
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I'm arguing for the same thing, really. When someone can't sustain their life, someone should help them. And instead of foisting that burden onto one person, instead we as a society should take up that mantle in the form of government assistance. Why is that a bad thing...?
It's bad because government isn't very good at determining need. And the mechanisms which prevent charities from getting out of control with the things they provide don't apply to government. I can choose which charities to support based on the things they do. I don't get to decide which government social programs to fund with my tax dollars. There are so many layers between the taxpayer and the social programs themselves that it's impossible to prevent massive abuse and waste.
We would be dramatically better off as a society eliminating every single social program based solely on need and letting private charities handle it instead. Much much much much better off.
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You obviously have missed my point entirely. Not surprising, really.
No. I haven't. You keep bringing up tearful cases where it's "obvious" that we should help those people, and anyone who denies them help is just a horrible person, but despite me asking several times, you still have not said where that government charity ends. When I do ask it, you dismiss the question itself.
It's not irrelevant. It's the core of the point I'm making. We should not hand power and responsibility over something to the government unless we can clearly define the limits to that power and responsibility. It ought to be pretty darn obvious why, but if you need me to explain it to you, I'm more than willing to.
Given that truth, it's very relevant for me to ask that question. Where does government charity end? If we are to accept your premise that the government should provide for anyone who can't provide for themselves, then you must also provide a limit for that. What things will we not provide under any circumstances? And what criteria will we use to determine which category something is in?
Because if we can't do that, then we shouldn't step foot into that area. And no, the fact that we have already done many things in which we make the government provide for people in need does *not* constitute a good reason to continue doing so, let alone expand the scope of our actions. That's the "slippery slope" argument I keep talking about.
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I suppose I could make an argument for how society failed the criminal to begin with, so they should take the burden of his activity on, but I don't really believe that. The truth is, if I can't afford to pay to be treated for that stab wound, everyone else is already paying for it right now. Except, at the moment, it's more expensive than it would be if we actually handed the governance of health care over to the government.
This is an entirely different argument though. Now we're getting into the debate about whether the medical profession absorbing the costs of those who can't pay and passing it onto those who can (which has always been done btw, so this is nothing new) is why our health care costs are so high today, and whether we can reduce that by going to some other system. I disagree with a whole number of assumptions with that argument, but that's honestly a completely different aspect of this.
We weren't talking about cost savings, were we? We were talking about whether the concept itself is a violation of our rights.