posted by JakeStratham:
On a semi-serious note, I have a question for those of you who believe personal property should be confiscated by the state (via taxation, stimulus, etc.), and distributed to those "less fortunate."
Would you be okay with me coming to your doorstep with a gun, demanding your cash to help out a guy on my street? If so, please PM me your address. If not, please explain the difference between that action and taxation for the purpose of funding SNAP.
To put my comment about WIC in context -- SNAP and its various branches exist
independently of how I feel about them. It is a safe bet that it will continue to exist. It is likely that, like almost any other conceivable "government servie," SNAP could be outsourced efficiently and funded privately; however, it is very very unlikely that either of these conditions will ever exist outside of libertarian circle jerk fantasies. So, if it must exist, wishing some sane restrictions could be put into place does not mean I think it's ok for some people to be stolen from in order to feed a few other people. (Of course, it is arguable that wishing for any degree of sanity in a government-run program is itself the preview of libertarian circle jerk fantasies.)
In another vein, on a moral level, and on what I consider a fairly reasonable level, I do not feel that people should be allowed to starve to death, even people who just fuck their own situations up and/or can't or won't get motivated to change them. I do not advocate any other person being forced to subscribe to this idea, or to engage in any of the acts I do in furtherance of the idea. But, separate from my opinion about how SNAP is managed, I do in fact agree wholeheartedly with the idea that generally, in a world where a device that can connect one to all the information in the world (and many of the people) can be bought for less than a week's pay at minimum wage, where there are more specialised cable television channels than there are sections in the Dewey Decimal System, where Ryan Seacrest is able to find work, etc. -- ie. a world of abundance in extreme -- that it's senseless to simply dust off the poverty-stricken and assume the problem will self-correct once they either die or get better jobs.
Very few problems in life will get better on their own, if only they are ignored long enough; why anyone thinks this approach will work with poverty is a mystery to me. It smacks of the same sort of economic illteracy that liberals use when they talk about "fair shares" and "slice of the pie" and similar concepts, as if wealth was a static value in the world from which we are all just taking bites.
But no, succinctly (too late!) I do not think that people should be forced to join me in my beliefs; and I do tend to think of my realistic view of the state as being separate from my somewhat romantic moral outlook.
Frank
