Jim McCoy wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Tim May wrote:
The thing about _traditional_ charity, of the religious or community sort, was that it was not treated as an "entitlement," as something the resentful masses could "demand" as part of their "human rights."
There's no substantial difference between their resentful whining about their rights and your resentful whining about your rights - except maybe that you whine more.
Actually there is a fundemental difference: what Tim demands is the right to be left alone and to be free from exernal influence as long as what he is doing does not directly hurt another, what "they" demand is to be taken care of by others because they either cannot or choose not to take care of themselves. The latter requires that someone productive (like Tim) be forced to take care of them through taxation or otherwise at gunpoint.
Tim is not productive. He *was* productive, but not anymore; his wealth might be productive in some indirect way, but it it certainly severable from him. He demands to be left alone by certain socio-economic apparatuses (socialized welfare) but is quite content to rely on the existence of other such apparatuses (investment entities, banks). Whether *that* is "hypocritical" doesn't interest me; I merely pointed out that he is constantly and resentfully whining about his own "rights" and about others' lack thereof--in that regard, he's of a kind with the people he is forever griping about.
In most societies this is considered the difference between a child and an adult...
This is a silly statement of the kind often made by people who have no solid grasp of history or social organization: most societies that radically differ from our own in their ways of maintaining/supervising their members (successful or not) have apparatuses so invasive and arbitrary that, in comparison, the IRS and assorted other bureaucracies look pretty benign.