To what extent should society help people who don't want to help themselves?
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  To what extent should society help people who don't want to help themselves?
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Author Topic: To what extent should society help people who don't want to help themselves?  (Read 1016 times)
Biden his time
Abdullah
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« on: January 21, 2023, 03:18:45 PM »

To what extent should society help people who don't want to help themselves?
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Computer89
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« Reply #1 on: January 22, 2023, 12:38:36 AM »

I think the 1996 Welfare Reform bill had good work rules for this to incentivize those people to work and I think it should be reimplemented.


At an individual level though, I think charitable organizations should provide help to anyone who needs it
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Badger
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« Reply #2 on: January 23, 2023, 06:30:23 PM »

Adjacent question. To what degree does one Trust the largely millionaire populated US Congress, or even state legislatures overwhelmingly dominated by upper middle class to wealthy individuals, to accurately identify individuals life situations who are "clearly unwilling to help themselves"?

My answer to that would be "little to none", which makes the answer to this threads question some what self-explanatory.
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All Along The Watchtower
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« Reply #3 on: March 20, 2023, 04:16:10 PM »

I think the 1996 Welfare Reform bill had good work rules for this to incentivize those people to work and I think it should be reimplemented.

What a monstrous thing to believe.
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Blue3
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« Reply #4 on: March 21, 2023, 03:36:13 AM »

I doubt there are many people who don't want to actually help themselves. Though there are many who are ignorant/uneducated through no fault of their own (though some due to their own choices), there are some with dehabilitating life circumstances.

I think the 1996 Welfare Reform bill had good work rules for this to incentivize those people to work and I think it should be reimplemented.


At an individual level though, I think charitable organizations should provide help to anyone who needs it
Work for Welfare has got to be one of the greatest spins of the 20th century. The purpose of welfare was originally so the mother of the household didn't need to work, and could stay home and take care of the kids. The antiquated idea of those strict gender roles should rightfully be disregarded, as well as growing awareness and acceptance (and outright growth) of non-traditional households. But overall, wasn't that a good thing? To help at least one adult in a household with children not work, if they so choose, incentiving them to take care of the children and the household? Nevermind the realities of underemployment and a terribly small minimum wage, especially in the tipped professions, as well as freelance and per-diem or part-time hourly wage jobs.
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Ferguson97
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« Reply #5 on: March 21, 2023, 10:51:53 AM »

Every single person should be provided with the absolute bare minimum needed for survival for free: food, water, shelter, healthcare, etc.

If someone chooses to reject these necessities, then that's their decision.

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« Reply #6 on: March 21, 2023, 12:11:56 PM »

One of the great questions of our time is how to differentiate between "won't help themselves" and "can't help themselves". If someone doesn't consent to the so-called Social Contract, we have to figure out a way to assess why, similarly to how a commercial contract can be invalidated if one is not of sound mind. If there can be a "reasonable person" standard is for participation in society, applying it as a sort of means test makes sense on the surface, until you get into the weeds of how that test is defined, sort of like how Badger said.

That said, I tend to err on the old standby of "we live in a society" so you ought to contribute to it to the best of your ability, or at least to some kind of bare minimum. If you don't meet whatever standard we can mostly agree upon, and you have the capacity to do so, then my knee-jerk reaction is to be fine with leaving you out of whatever social safety system there is, or at least bumping you down to a different one. But then there's the question of WHY you aren't adhering to whatever standards our society has, and whether that kind of rejection serves as proof you don't have the capacity to take part in the first place. Not to mention the fact that it would be a tall order to agree on a set of societal obligations at this point, anyway.
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John Dule
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« Reply #7 on: March 21, 2023, 01:33:02 PM »

It is a fundamental law of nature that all living animals must perform some sort of work in order to live. No social, political, or economic system is capable of superseding this basic fact.
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shua
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« Reply #8 on: March 28, 2023, 08:50:49 PM »

Society should try to where we can, but it tends to be exceedingly difficult. And you may come to hard decisions like whether to severely curtail someone's freedom so they don't end up dead in a ditch.
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