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I had a friend who decided to give the social safety net a whirl for two years to see how easy it was. He is not American and lives in the EU, so the safety net where he is is much larger. He ended up writing a book about it. It was not easy or fun. He had a place to live, but he had certain routines for grocery shopping to make his money stretch.
I think it is harder when people have kids. A lot of jobs do not pay enough to prove childcare. We hear stories from time to time about kids dying or getting seriously injured in unlicensed home daycares. These days staffing is also poor, so you have fewer places available for the smaller babies who may need one adult for 4 or 5 babies. It is certainly easy to see why it is expensive at that age, since it’s not sustainable to charge someone $200 a week per kids. FWIW, under typical circumstances, SNAP requires able boded adults without children to work or volunteer in some capacity to get food stamps unless they are disabled, but that does not apply to adults with children.
If ones takes money from the state they should agree to limiting the number of children. Its a fair swap.
People that don't understand that are part of the problem.
So, what should we do with these “undesirables”? They exist just everyone else, so they are going BE somewhere. Would you like to:
Mass incarcerate them? Your tax dollars will still pay for them to eat sleep and poop in prison. And, it may be unconstitutional if they didn’t do anything wrong in first place.
Forced Deportation? You said “undesirables” should not be able to live in this society or take from it. Well, forced deportation would be the realization of that sentiment. Of course, many of them are American citizens so again…unconstitutional and unethical/immoral.
Mass Execution? Anybody up for this one…. anybody? I sure as hell hope not!
So to answer the question, people should be able to do whatever it is that they need to survive. No one is in a place to judge whether they are the “deserving poor” “mentally ill” or just “able-bodied and lazy”. Leave them alone and let them run their own race in life, and you just run yours. Unless you’re okay with the above options.
If you don't plan a mass assassination of the outliers, you need to find a way to fit them in. Even prisoners in jail do some work, partly in running the prison and in my state, there are work programs that teach a trade like furniture refinishing and reupholstery. The shop is open to the public at reduced cost if you don't mind a wait, which then benefits two parts of the population.
Someone said we enable homelessness, but I think at this point in time we are creating it through non-living wages and unaffordable housing and health care, rising costs of just about everything else. You can't impoverish people and then think up ways to punish them for it.
You mean, all the artists whose work doesn't sell, or authors who just get rejection slips? Mathematicians who spend their PhD trying to prove Fermat's Last Theorem? My mom, who, from the standpoint if classical economic, baked cookies and fiddled around the house?
What is the economic value of the productivity of a night watchman?
Personally, I used the skills and talents I possessed to overproduce, so there would be some surplus wealth for those who did not. So I wouldn't have to step over their bodies in the streets. And I sure didn't want them at my job site making my work harder, or having to re-do what they had done incompetently or haphazardly.
I'll base my opinion on how the question was comprised and comprehended .
Yes as humans we have the right to exist. This ' allowing' to exist with caveat that one MUST contribute is where the rubber meets the road. One is a fact, we exist and we at some point expire. The conscious decision to ' allow' is more a subjective perspective. Philosophically , if a tree bears fruit it's benefiting and contributing . For even the worm that Burrows into the fruit benefits and contributed to nature. Not a choice per se. It's survival.
The tree (society).
The worms ( life forms).
So, what should we do with these “undesirables”? They exist just everyone else, so they are going BE somewhere. Would you like to:
...
Go get a job like everyone else. What is wrong with requiring those who want free stuff from society to earn it? Remember, the whole premise of this thread is not about those who truly have some disability that prevents them from working. Instead this about those who are capable of doing something but won't.
For those who appreciate a good work of fiction as a means of expressing ideas that may be so unimaginably abhorrent that one does not ordinarily encounter them in polite society (yet somehow such ideas manage to take root anyway and evolve into non-fiction situations), I recommend to you Neal Shusterman's Unwind Distology series of four books. Here is a brief description of the premise of these novels:
Quote:
After America’s Second Civil War, the Pro-Choice and Pro-Life armies came to an agreement. According to their Bill of Life, human life may not be terminated from the moment of conception until the age of thirteen. But between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, the child may be gotten rid of by their parent through a process called “unwinding.”
By repurposing a teen’s organs and other body parts in living recipients, the unwound child’s life doesn’t technically end. According to society’s leaders, unwinding leads to a healthier and safer community, as troublesome and unwanted teens are used for the greater good.
Connor is a rebel whose unwinding was ordered by his parents. Risa, a ward of the state, has been slated for unwinding due to cost cutting. And Lev, his parents’ tenth child, has been destined for unwinding since birth as a religious tithe. As their paths intersect, they start to fight for their own destinies. But do they stand a chance of escaping their fate or proving their lives are worth saving?
I can truly say that the "unwinding scene" which occurs in the first book is one of the most horrific things I have ever read -- absolutely the stuff of nightmares. These books are not for the faint of heart -- but they are for those who can see parallels with the direction in which our current society may be heading. It is not such a stretch of the imagination to foresee a day when unwanted and undesirable "burdens" on society may be put to a more useful purpose by being made to contribute their life-saving internal organs to the productive members of society.
Like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and others, these dystopian political works of fiction serve to give us a view into what might happen in our society if our quiet and passive acceptance of proposed ideas about what to do with certain "non-contributing" people within our society eventually allow these ideas to gain national acceptance.
Last edited by Rachel NewYork; 09-19-2021 at 06:48 AM..
People should be able to do whatever it is that they need to survive. No one is in a place to judge whether they are the “deserving poor” “mentally ill” or just “able-bodied and lazy”. Leave them alone and let them run their own race in life, and you just run yours. Unless you’re okay with the above options.
For those who appreciate a good work of fiction as a means of expressing ideas that may be so unimaginably abhorrent that one does not ordinarily encounter them in polite society (yet somehow such ideas manage to take root anyway and evolve into non-fiction situations), I recommend to you Neal Shusterman's Unwind Distology series of four books. Here is a brief description of the premise of these novels:
I can truly say that the "unwinding scene" which occurs in the first book is one of the most horrific things I have ever read -- absolutely the stuff of nightmares. These books are not for the faint of heart -- but they are for those who can see parallels with the direction in which our current society may be heading. It is not such a stretch of the imagination to foresee a day when unwanted and undesirable "burdens" on society may be put to a more useful purpose by being made to contribute their life-saving internal organs to the productive members of society.
Like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and others, these dystopian political works of fiction serve to give us a view into what might happen in our society if our quiet and passive acceptance of proposed ideas about what to do with certain "non-contributing" people within our society eventually allow these ideas to gain national acceptance.
Thanks for the recommendation - I just put the first book on hold at my local library. Apparently it is very popular with the YA (young adult) readers.
So, what should we do with these “undesirables”? They exist just everyone else, so they are going BE somewhere. Would you like to:
Mass incarcerate them? Your tax dollars will still pay for them to eat sleep and poop in prison. And, it may be unconstitutional if they didn’t do anything wrong in first place.
Forced Deportation? You said “undesirables” should not be able to live in this society or take from it. Well, forced deportation would be the realization of that sentiment. Of course, many of them are American citizens so again…unconstitutional and unethical/immoral.
Mass Execution? Anybody up for this one…. anybody? I sure as hell hope not!
So to answer the question, people should be able to do whatever it is that they need to survive. No one is in a place to judge whether they are the “deserving poor” “mentally ill” or just “able-bodied and lazy”. Leave them alone and let them run their own race in life, and you just run yours. Unless you’re okay with the above options.
About 15% of the population is unemployable because of low intellectual ability. This includes people with classified disabilities and also those who are just mentally slow.
I think the best strategy to deal with this is to provide a subsistence level of social support so these people are sheltered and fed, and to whatever extent possible legally and morally discourage them from reproducing. However because of regression to the mean actually eliminating such a group of people would take a very long time, beyond the time horizon of democratic politics.
At the same time there are human subgroups with different distributions of intellectual ability, so it's not as if regression to the mean is impossible to overcome. I don't think we have any solid evidence that cultural norms and institutions can influence genetic drift; it's speculative whether this is possible within a modern society. I tend to think various bottleneck events are the more likely explanation.
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