Pointedstick wrote:
Moda, one thing I find a little perplexing is that sometimes it seems like you feel the need to defend government programs or welfare from attack, yet I don't recall ever actually seeing you claim that the programs are actually helpful. When we argue that welfare traps people in cycles of dependency, you quibble over terms and sometimes argue that welfare is necessary or morally justified as a consequence of private property, but I don't believe you've ever actually argued that welfare makes people's lives better or helps them escape from hopelessness or poverty (or whatever bad condition)--this is the whole point, I believe.
So, maybe you could offer your own perspective a bit? If you believe that welfare and transfer payments help people, could you explain your thinking? If you don't think they do, well then why are we arguing?
I think I have offered my perspective a few times... that government should provide a general support for the basic needs of people.
Certain programs are crap. Others are actually quite useful, and are difficult to "game." Further, the mere existence of the vast claims of ownership of un-earned "private property," in my mind, necessitates payment to everyone else for those. Withholding resources that you didn't create for others' labor is theft, IMO. Though, it's all tough because I see us all in one big moral dilemma, with unearned "private property," and "government" being a couple imperfect quasi-solutions to the dilemma.
I can't "prove" any of this. But I am ok to state my position, observations, instincts, and then admitbrting room for wrongness or that I haven't been able to "deductively prove" my position... no more than anyone can "prove" a moral solution to a moral dilemma.
But Kshartle carries with his "proven" assertions, and lectures about logical fallacies, with very little knowledge about how logic must be structured... hence him not being able to prove even to libertarians that he is right... and I have to do a few things with all these certainties he presents:
1) Define terms... Property... poverty... rights... ownership... deserve... violence/force... it's really important to figure out what he means by these, because philosophers have debated inductively regarding human morality for centuries, yet K thinks he's figured it all out.
2) Establish true premises... If his premises aren't true, this needs to be questioned or pointed out.
3) Establish the conclusion logically follows from the premises in all cases... once again, if this is not obvious, we have to question and point out this bad logic.
So of course I have questions. Him (and other libertarians, to a degree) are trying to hand-wave away the issue of poverty and misery of others via the word "charity."
I'd try to "prove" something if I thought I really had a whole lot to prove other than definitions are being used sloppily, history is being misquoted, conclusions are not necessarily or even likely following premises, and the premises might not even be true to begin with.
"Men did not make the earth. It is the value of the improvements only, and not the earth itself, that is individual property. Every proprietor owes to the community a ground rent for the land which he holds."
- Thomas Paine