Some people seem to exist in a bubble where they believe that nothing bad will ever happen to them or their loved ones, so paying to improve society has no benefit to themselves.
But charitable causes perpetuate the problems by creating an industry around them rather than trying to find solutions for them. You can’t trust industry to solve civil problems like healthcare or housing, since they shouldn’t be problems in the first place. Its like trying to trust the free market to keep people from raping and killing each other—people will rape and kill with or without the market! Some level of coercion is necessary that free market principles cannot employ.
> It's likely caused by the very same thing that causes human beings to
We’re not billiard balls. We have agency. Nothing causes a human being to choose to commit immoral acts vs. immoral acts. A human being may be put in a situation that may entice that person’s corrupt desires (we used to call this temptation), and responsibility while mitigating culpability is possible when someone’s rational faculties are overwhelmed, but the choice remains.
Blaming systems for theft is scapegoating and an evasion of responsibility. (To make this clearer by distinction: a starving man taking bread from an overstocked warehouse during a famine is not choosing to commit an immoral act; he isn’t stealing in the first place, as some share of that bread is his).
This really doesn't explain why particular places and times in history have much higher crime levels. If what you said was true then rule of law would have been the standard throughout history... it has not been.
Today a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.
This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.
We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.
This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.
I congratulate all of you ladies and gentlemen, all of you in the Congress, in the executive departments and all of you who come from private life, and I thank you for your splendid efforts in behalf of this sound, needed and patriotic legislation.
If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time.
”
OscarTheGrinch|2 months ago
Hendrikto|2 months ago
Same with education. I am more than happy to pay taxes for an education system, even if I do not personally have children.
DiscourseFan|2 months ago
gmerc|2 months ago
jonhohle|2 months ago
lo_zamoyski|2 months ago
We’re not billiard balls. We have agency. Nothing causes a human being to choose to commit immoral acts vs. immoral acts. A human being may be put in a situation that may entice that person’s corrupt desires (we used to call this temptation), and responsibility while mitigating culpability is possible when someone’s rational faculties are overwhelmed, but the choice remains.
Blaming systems for theft is scapegoating and an evasion of responsibility. (To make this clearer by distinction: a starving man taking bread from an overstocked warehouse during a famine is not choosing to commit an immoral act; he isn’t stealing in the first place, as some share of that bread is his).
pixl97|2 months ago
ivape|2 months ago
[deleted]
cwillu|2 months ago
Today a hope of many years' standing is in large part fulfilled. The civilization of the past hundred years, with its startling industrial changes, has tended more and more to make life insecure. Young people have come to wonder what would be their lot when they came to old age. The man with a job has wondered how long the job would last.
This social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty millions of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.
We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.
This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.
I congratulate all of you ladies and gentlemen, all of you in the Congress, in the executive departments and all of you who come from private life, and I thank you for your splendid efforts in behalf of this sound, needed and patriotic legislation.
If the Senate and the House of Representatives in this long and arduous session had done nothing more than pass this Bill, the session would be regarded as historic for all time. ”
--Franklin D. Roosevelt
treetalker|2 months ago