Blog Action Day: Poverty in America

I was talking to a libertarian friend of mine after class a few days ago about health care and welfare. He was of the opinion that the government should not provide either, and upon further prodding he explained that he thought poor people didn’t deserve them. My friend, of course, “earned” the right to be born into an upper-middle class family that can feed and cloth him and send him to a university, whereas the 47 million Americans without health insurance are just too lazy to go out and make a better life for themselves.

Sure, he was more straightforward about it than conservatives usually are, but I think quite a few Republicans subscribe to a similar belief — not that you’d ever hear most of them admit it. The problems with this line of thinking should be obvious, but I can elaborate a bit just for the hell of it: we aren’t all on a level playing field. If you’re born into a family that can consistently feed, shelter, clothe, and educate you, you’re better off than the majority of the people on our planet.

Sure, there are some lazy people out there gaming the system, but there are also people who are in desparate need of help. We have the means to help them, and plenty of resources to spare. Imagine if all this money we have been spending on weaponry to blow people up in Iraq had been spent instead on genetic engineering technology for crops to alleviate worldwide hunger, or for humanitarian aid for war-torn third world countries. The government is already taxing us. They might as well be using the money to help people, not blow them apart.

About probabilityZero

I'm a rather boring, geeky college student. Most of my time is spent at a computer, reading a book, or sitting in (mostly uninteresting) classes. My hobbies include reading, blogging, creating and running websites, creating amateur video games, arguing incessantly on discussion forums, and buying books on amazon.com because I'm too lazy to go to the library.
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5 Responses to Blog Action Day: Poverty in America

  1. cheritycall says:

    How are you?, Do something to help the hungry people from Africa or India,
    I created this blog about this subject:
    in http://tinyurl.com/556poc

  2. Kelvin26 says:

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  3. Wolf91 says:

    Rig some strobes in the structure, bouced up, and maybe even add extra diffusion at the accordion level. ,

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  5. says:

    As much as I would love to say that this would be a fitting last eospide to the show, it wouldn’t be.It’s a children’s show, if they actually ended the show that way, the kids would think that having imaginary friends would mean having autism, questioning their parents if everything was real or just a figment of their imagination. I’m not saying the comic is bad, it was actually pretty touching that it made me cry. It would’ve been a nice ending but think about how it would affect the minds of kids.I applaud whoever wrote this comic, because they made the plot interesting, and make you think that autism might have been the main point of the show.

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