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richardhutnik on 30 November 2011
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SamuelRSmith said:
richardhutnik said:

When a society has a set of values it seeks to uphold, say derived from natural law, reason, and other things such as science or tradition, and it fails to uphold these values, and things collapse, then how is that not robbing from the future?  If it isn't theft it is certainly negligence.  I don't say that the solution need to be that the government does it, but the society as a whole needs to do it.  Now, one can debate what these values are, and what the state of society needs to be, but it is still there.  Part of that is to ask what the net outcome of certain things happening, like say homeless people dying in the streets, or crime running rampant, or a civil war breaking out, or even polution, with businesses creating poluted pools of toxic chemicals in areas accessible by the public.  To not ask such questions on what the values should be and the net outcome of ignoring things, is negligence on the very least.


Boom! There we go. I've always argued that we have a moral obligation to help those less fortunate, or to do what we can to protect the environment. I agree, it is negligent to ignore those things. But we have to be careful about forcing others to do things they don't want to. I say, do what you can, for the causes that you support, and try to convince others to help or donate.

In a society where the fire protection was private, most would buy the fire insurance. For those that didn't because they didn't want to, so be it. For those who didn't because they couldn't afford it, well there could be a charity that provdided fire protection for those people, using donations to buy resources, and volunteers to provide the service. If you cared so greatly about this cause, you could either donate your money to help buy new materials, or you, yourself, could volunteer for the force.

What I don't like are the people who think "I'm so holy, I can donate other people's money".

I am of the belief that the welfare state exists in western nations (at least America) to placate middle class guilt over those less fortunate.  The problems of the poor and needy are there, and politicians say something needs to be done, so they get votes.  Also, such is pitched as a secure safety net.  And the mass will of good intentions becomes government programs they don't change, don't really change anything, but supposedly make people feel something is being done.  

But, in light of this, I will also end up saying here that if the problems aren't tended to, they will rise.  If blocks of people decide to not pay for fire insurance, then you have the entire block go on fire, and so on.  And you can't just let things in place go, because it doesn't promise anything.  And it is all good talk to say about what one personally believes.  What actually difference will be done to make it so?