Quote:
Originally Posted by silveroak
FYI: to be clear- I do not personally object to welfare, but I think it is important to understand the viewpoint of people who do, which is essentially that their money os going to support things they object to such as drugs, some religious groups, etc. It's easier to say they should be more tollerant, but when you consider the same subject with groups you disapprove of, it is much harder to say we should just let it happen and it's not a big deal.
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I don't think this is as important as you think. Everybody, and I'm sure this is true - _everybody_ objects to some portion of the goverment's spending. Maybe you object to military spending, or oil subsidization, or welfare, or planned parenthood funding, or something else entirely. But that isn't important. The statement "I don't want _my_ money paying for _this_" is irrelevant; you're a citizen of <some country> which has decided that this spending makes the country a better place in some way or another.
Maybe you think that the government shouldn't be spending money on these things, which isn't irrelevant and is instead the subject of reasonable discussion. But the statement that _my_ money shouldn't go to these things is just a distraction. Everybody pays for things they don't want, but the millions of people in the country have come to a compromise that that's okay because everyone has different opinions which, in turn, makes the country a better place (for free!).
Cheers,
Kernal
As a totally irrelevant aside, this is a thread whose title wonders about financial inequality. Obviously some financial inequality is good - nobody argues that everybody should be guaranteed exactly equal shares of the GDP or whatever (that's more extreme than Communism!). Similarly nobody thinks that more inequality is always better - if the top 1% own 100% of the wealth, this is bad (and traditionally called "slavery").
Presumably there's some distribution which represents an optimal middle ground by some metric (overall quality of life, or economic growth, or innovation, or something else entirely). Is anybody familiar with sources which discuss this optimal distribution? That could be extremely interesting.