Every human deserves to live in dignity. If someone is unable to earn enough money to live a dignified live, society has to provide the means, wealth has to be redistributed.
What exactly living in dignity means and how exactly wealth should be redistributed is certainly always up for debate but this is the basic outline of a pretty standard argument. I would, for example, be very surprised if less than a large majority of people in my native Germany agreed with the basic argument.
Those who agree with the argument have compared the immorality of taking away someone’s money with the immorality of not enabling someone to live a dignified life and concluded that the second violation of rights weighs heavier.
>Those who agree with the argument have compared the immorality of taking away someone’s money with the immorality of not enabling someone to live a dignified life and concluded that the second violation of rights weighs heavier."
This is the crux of the issue right here.
Another key point is that the usefulness (to the holder) of a given unit of wealth is inversely proportional to how much total wealth they have.
$100 is worth a lot more to someone who has $3 than it is to someone who has $3,000,000. Therefore there is a certain utilitarian argument in favor of putting the wealth where it will have the most benefit. And yes, I know utilitarianism is horribly flawed when you force it to its logical conclusion, that isn't the point here.
Think of it a bit like spreading fertilizer on a field. If you want a good harvest, it doesn't really make any sense to distribute it in any way except according to its need.
As the parent said: this is just one argument. I'm not saying that it is conclusive, nor do I expect you to agree with it.
Problem is, that argument doesn't apply to inequality. You can be perfecty dignified on the bottom of a highly inequal society (and most poor americans are), and those that aren't very often have a non-financial reason (such as drugs).
If you couldn't afford to pay your bills, couldn't afford a place to live, couldn't afford health insurance, couldn't afford to buy clothes for your children, would you still have that view? Or would you be rather glad that there's a system (even if not a great one) that helps balance society out a little bit?
And frankly you shouldn't need to have to imagine being in that position, how can you not feel that we should all care about those worse off than ourselves?
Oh, and there are plenty of selfish reasons as well. Society would fall apart if only the rich were able to live and we left the poor to, eventually, either become rich or die out. Who would make your cars, clothes, food, serve you a coffee, sell you your ticket to a sports game, etc etc.
I've been in between jobs for several months. I have less than $1k in the bank.
I had a confirmed job offer from nVidia. Then yesterday, I was notified they just went into a "hiring freeze" due to their stock being down. So even though they have 2 billion dollars in the bank, they can't hire me. Poof, I just went from "decent living" to "likely impoverished". (I've been in the process of getting a job there since January. Everything went very positively at every step of the way, so I didn't try to pursue anything else.)
My wife is displaying signs of schizophrenia, which has become acutely evident to both of us within the last several months (and slowly evident over the last 5 years). We're both freaked about it, especially because there is literally nothing we can do. She was just hired at a coffee shop, so there aren't any health benefits. And since we're married, she can't use her father's insurance.
I personally suffer from either hemorrhoids or rectal cancer or stomach ulcers --- I can't go ask a doctor because, again, no job = no health insurance. So I try to ignore the blood and quietly hope it's nothing serious, even though there's a possibility it might be.
Where's my charity? I don't get any. And I don't want any, unless it's to help my wife.
Because people are supposed to deal with their own problems.
It's not easy. In fact, it blows. But that's why they're called "problems". You just deal with them. You have to.
If you want to be charitable, then email me an offer to let me work for you remotely. I have a decade of experience and can solve virtually any software task. There's just nothing in St Louis MO, which is where we happen to be stuck at.
I don't need to hire anyone and don't hire people based on charity. I do however make monthly donations to registered charities (in the UK), and I pay my taxes, while asking politicians to raise my taxes.
Honestly, in 90% of cases it's purely a choice. Most people in North America can't pay rent because they need to live downtown and work a min wage job. Let me tell you that there are plenty of starbucks in places with lower rent. If you can't pay rent in North America have 2 arms 2 legs and an IQ of 100 it's because you're spending your money stupidly and/or lazy.
My ex wife (IQ of 140-150) phoned me the other day complaining about how she can't pay rent. Note that she lives in social housing despite making in excess of 68K per year. She works for the gov't and could go to any number of places with cheap rent, yet she insists on living in some of the most expensive areas of Canada.
Two weeks ago she was raving about how much fun the new Green Day edition of Rock Band was and next week she is going on vacation.
Think there might be a connection as to why she can't pay subsidized rent let alone market rent?
When I was with her, I bought my own place at 22 while working a crap tech support job.
There's plenty of problems with the system, including people who are able to get far more than they should out of it, and people who don't get enough from it. That doesn't mean we should scrap it entirely.
A counterpoint example (although this is from the UK, but similar thing). When my sister was unemployed a couple of years ago, she signed up for unemployment benefits ("job seekers allowance"). That was something pretty low like maybe USD$100/week, but it was OK as she was living with parents and not paying rent. The purpose of job seekers allowance is, as the name suggests, to support people looking for work, and you stay on it you are meant to regularly prove that you are doing your best to find a job.
What she found was that, while she genuinely wanted a job, and wasn't picky (she wasn't thinking "I need to get a job suited to my skill set in a really specific industry", she would have been happy in a supermarket), the government staff that she had to see twice a month clearly didn't care about helping her find a job, and didn't even care about checking whether she was trying to find a job herself. To them it was all about ticking her off on a list and paying her the money.
That's really terrible, because it means that if you want to get benefits instead of working it's incredibly easy, and because, if they had bothered to help her find work sooner, she would have spent less time getting benefits, therefore taking less money out of the system.
So, was the system good in this example? No, it was terrible. But, at the same time, because she couldn't find a job, she did need the system, and she would have been much worse off if it didn't exist.
But I don't understand the attitude of "It's noble to steal money from some, and redistribute it to others". It seems immoral.