Quote from: evoorhees on July 01, 2011, 04:53:45 PM

Quote from: ~~~~~ on July 01, 2011, 12:54:01 PM

In the US you have to be a millionaire to afford to take care of your own and your families health too without assistance (due to the massive power of the insurance industry etc).

If 99% of people saved all the time to be ready to care for parents, grandparents, spouses and children... then there'd be a lot less people out there willing to spend money buying the fruits of peoples work. Which means there'd be a lot more people not earning enough to be able to save.

So I say again, 99% of the population is in both Group A and Group B. I take it you do not agree?

How old are you anyway? Atlas is off the hook, he's allowed to think Ayn Rand is witty and clever for another few years at least before the embarrassment sets in. But what's your excuse?

Your first sentence is false. One need not be a "millionaire" to care for their family. None of my extended family, nor any of my friends' families, are millionaires... yet somehow they're all able to care for their grandparents - usually because the grandparents were thrifty and prudent and made good life decisions. They didn't rely on others to pick up the slack.

Individuals should be responsible for themselves, and when they cannot be, they should rely on the voluntary efforts of friends, family, and charity. In no case is it moral, or justified, to forcefully take the property of other people - who have goals, family situations, and desires of their own - in order to satisfy your own needs. It is theft.

And no, people in general are not in both groups in equal portions. Many individuals TAKE much more than they give to the public trough. Most people actually, are net takers, and it is a minority of successful, very productive individuals who are forced by government violence and the threat of imprisonment to support the rest. I think it is immoral to steal wealth from any person, whether from poor to rich or rich to poor. It is wrong for the Goldman Sachs executive to steal from the poor through his lobbying of the Federal Reserve to inflate the money supply. It is similarly wrong of the poor person to lobby Congress to steal the money from the wealthy man and give it to him in the form of various "public services."

Regarding my age, I'm not sure why that matters, but I'm 27. When I was a teenager, as you assume I am, I thought much more like you do. Naive and with a very confused moral compass. I'm not here defending Ayn Rand, I'm here defending myself.

Ah, the great fallacy of the free marketeers... that everyone who is rich MUST be highly productive.

Quote

In a society of an hundred thousand families, there will perhaps be one hundred who don't labour at all, and who yet, either by violence, or by the more orderly oppression of law, employ a greater part of the labour of society than any other ten thousand in it. The division of what remains, too, after this enormous defalcation, is by no means made in proportion to the labour of each individual. On the contrary those who labour most get least. The opulent merchant, who spends a great part of his time in luxury and entertainments, enjoys a much greater proportion of the profits of his traffic, than all the Clerks and Accountants who do the business. These last, again, enjoying a great deal of leisure, and suffering scarce any other hardship besides the confinement of attendance, enjoy a much greater share of the produce, than three times an equal number of artisans, who, under their direction, labour much more severely and assiduously. The artisan again, tho' he works generally under cover, protected from the injuries of the weather, at his ease and assisted by the convenience of innumerable machines, enjoys a much greater share than the poor labourer who has the soil and the seasons to struggle with, and, who while he affords the materials for supplying the luxury of all the other members of the common wealth, and bears, as it were, upon his shoulders the whole fabric of human society, seems himself to be buried out of sight in the lowest foundations of the building.
Adam Smith, first draft of Wealth Of Nations