| theprof00 said: Except who's to say those are certain productive citizens? Perhaps having kids with no dad, or in extreme poverty, will lead to a very difficult life where bad choices become easy to make, or force the family to become a burden on the society. The pro-life says "you shouldn't kill your kids and you shouldn't be a leech on society". In my point of view, you agreeing with this makes me think that you're one of those people who believes things like "people don't succeed because they don't try hard enough". |
Which just sounds like what Bill Bennett said when he said that aborting every black baby - while genocidal and morally reprehensible - would lower crime.
But yeah, I do believe that people often don't succeed because they don't try hard enough. Or they do try but they apply their efforts in the wrong direction. There are principles of success, and most people aren't successful or not because of sheer bad luck. You might have the bad luck to be born into an unproductive culture, though, and you aren't likely to identify the flaws in the behavior and break out of that. Poor education doesn't really equip people to be cultural critics, after all. The question is whether government welfare programs help or hurt, and I don't really think they help. The war on poverty has been as big a failure as the war on drugs because it doesn't improve the cultures in bad areas, it only incentivizes and enables more of the same self-destructive behavior. You could dump trillions of dollars on Appalachia, and nothing would really change.
