| richardhutnik said: If you do not believe in government intervening to give people fish, cannot show where anyone else would step in (with numbers on what the level of intervention would be), and cannot show where people can train, and what areas there are viable jobs, then you cannot show that the argument about teaching people to fish would hold, and government out would have everything ok. See, I can name numbers here. Without government intervention, there is a report that poverty rate would be double what it is now: http://www.offthechartsblog.org/without-the-safety-net-more-than-a-quarter-of-americans-would-have-been-poor-last-year/ Now, unless you like numbers of people being worse off doubling, show that without government, that you would end up not only cause it to not increase to double, but be better than it is now. Can you do this? If you can't, then the only thing we have is, lack of government involvement means more people suffering. |
I'm not sure where you get this strange idea that people have no agency of their own and have to be told what to do. In a market economy, people have a tendency to figure out where the money is and go there, and this is much easier in a thriving, dynamic economy than in one that is overregulated and sluggish. Someone directing people to train in a particular thing also has a terrible tendency to create a glut of workers for which there aren't sufficient jobs. See Obama's green energy jobs program and what a bust it was. All it really succeeded in doing was wasting people's time. I guess that doesn't count as people getting hurt, though.
No one is seriously advocating a sudden yanking away of the safety net. Just as we didn't get here overnight but as the result of a great ratcheting effect, it would be wise to ratchet things back rather than to do away with them in one fell swoop. I realize you have it in your head that Paul Ryan is the reincarnation of Ayn Rand just because he's a fan of her books, but this is pure hype and fearmongering. His policies are far, far closer to Obama's than to whatever hers would be. So this line of argument about gutting the safety net is a red herring because it's not something that's going to happen, unless our fiscal profligacy finally catches up to us and then the whole question of how much of a safety net we should have and what it should look like becomes moot.
