Controversial Political Opinions

[JasonBlack]

(07-14-2022, 10:27 AM)David Horn Wrote:

(07-13-2022, 10:49 PM)JasonBlack Wrote: I've gone over this a few times, but trying to cast all power as either having or lacking character isn't particularly useful. I am currently poor, and have lived among several subcultures of poor people. The individuals I've seen range from
- disabled people
- rapists
- orphans
- falsely accused who never got their record cleared
- mentally retarded people
- other sex offenders (ranging from as horrific as violently molesting children to as trivial as public urination)
- veterans with PTSD
- violent psychopaths
- single mothers with children from 5 different dads
- mothers who were single because their husband died and left them supporting multiple children
- liberals who work retail
- conservatives who work retail
- farmers
- start up entrepreneurs

....as you can see, you can't lump such a varied collection of people into one set of good/bad values.

Your list is sad and yet incomplete. Failure to flourish has far too many causes, and an inital failure can be so devasting in the long run that, regardless of who or what is at fault, it's career ending. This is the single greatest falacy of the neoliberal 'hard work yields great rewards' argument. It's ceratinly true that it can, given a structure to support the striver or just great luck, but failure is more likely and catastrophic failure more than possible.

Ours is a needlessly cruel system that doesn't even get optimum results. Then again, it does reward the already rewarded and only punishes the 'least of these' -- just as it's designed to do. In short, it's the worst of the GIGO systems acceptable in polite company. The argument for that is always the same: we can't reward bad behavior. If it was only that simple.

"Hard work yields rewards" is still fundamentally true. What isn't true is "hard work is enough to get you rich".

Obviously, we have to simplify for the sake of illustration, but let's say you can place people's life circumstances on a scale from -10 to +10, with around zero being the average of American making around $35,000 with kids, some minor health problems and a stressful job. It's not going to get you from a -8 all the way up to +6, but it can usually get you from, say, -7 to -2, +1 to +5, etc. Not everyone in America has the potential to get rich, or even upper middle class, but any country with substantial personal freedom allows you the control to make your life significantly better than where you were at at your worst.

This is what a lot of people miss with capitalism. Just because life isn't 100% fair for everyone (just like it isn't in any other country. you'd have to implement straight up Eugenics to achieve that) doesn't mean you can't take steps to drastically improve your position over the span of years or decades. In fact, it's something we pretty much take for granted that we'll be in a better place in 10 years, 20 years, etc. Most places in the world cannot assume this the way we can.