Comment by mothballed
6 days ago
Yes im absolutely certain the broken redistribution system is one of the most pressing problems in US, but of course its not the only one. Not because recipients dont "deserve" a living but rather it poisons the productive and it provides the wrong incentives to recipients while conditioning them to depend on a bloated government that now has total leverage on their life (and of course, virtually assured votes to whoever are bribing recipients with OPM redistributed away from the big bad other voter), all while speed running towards a ruinous national debt even if they deserved the moon and stars and were paid it.
Well, I do agree that the redistribution system is absolutely broken. Most welfare recipients do in fact work (and benefit others) but our capitalist redistribution system has decided that they don't deserve to live with dignity, leaving the centrally planned redistribution system to pick up the slack.
The fallacy here is you're trying to frame things in terms of "deserving." An African child deserves life and wealth as much as an American one. A guy slaving 16 hours a day ripping shingles off of roofs "deserves" a mansion and high-dollar escorts as much as the playboy heir of some mega-corp. Some starving African child probably deserves to rip the computer/tablet/phone you're writing this with out of your hand and sell it for a bucket of rice to feed his family. Play this fallacy out to its extension and the whole thing collapses in any system that's attempted to roll out the "deserve" system beyond a pretty constrained fraction of its GDP, and then both the deserving and undeserving end up worse off.
You're fixating on the word deserve in my post, but that's got nothing to do with my point. I'm saying that the market has decided that it doesn't have to pay a living wage since the government picks up the bill to keep things going. I think that's perverse.
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