Personally I don't think we should be incentivizing people to show up to work under threat of homelessness/starvation like we did in the past, even if it may be more effective. If people want to live their lives in the "comfort" of SNAP and SSI, I'm personally ok with it. The market will adjust and maybe those blue collar jobs will begin paying even more (or people will adapt)
Nobody questions your personal ability to voluntarily provide for them, though.
The question is how much the rest of us are involuntarily having to provide for them, and more relevantly, whether or not society is even really being improved if the result is an increasing number of people so unable / unwilling to contribute to society that they can't even be bothered to show up for an interview.
It is very easy to spend other people's money supporting people perceived as downtrodden. It just might not be the solution proponents think it is.
Well ok, but that's up to our votes to decide. You may vote one way and I will vote my way. If you don't want to provide for these people under these circumstances, vote for someone who will roll back welfare. The system wouldn't work if taxes were voluntary (how many people were poor before welfare when charity was the only way people got help?) so I see no moral hazard in coercing people who don't want to support the poor to do so
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the outcome".
I see no moral hazard in coercing people
and that's the problem. Coercion is inherently immoral as it denies agency, which is the very essence of humanity. Agency / self-control is the fundamental difference between being a human being, and being a piece of property.
I used coercion because I knew that was how libertarians/other people who generally don't agree with me see it. I actually see it in the following way: the world is not a perfect free market, and in many cases letting a free market run its course results in the poor/disabled/children of bad parents needlessly being hurt or dying. I think its more just to pay to feed 20 poor people than to let 1 die due to poverty. Its not like this imposes some seriously constrained living conditions on everybody. I earn income in the highest nominal tax bracket and nobody I know making this much, including myself, is hurting because of our current system
There's also the argument that the money you own isn't truly yours. It's the product of a large amount of investment on behalf of your parents (which varies for everybody) and the government in terms of education (of you and everyone else to create an economy where you're able to perform your current job) and infrastructure, with the end result of you being able to perform your job. So its taxation is not theft because you do owe that money back to the rest of society. I think preventing hunger/homelessness is in general a good way to spend that money
Coercion isn't immoral any more than breathing is immoral. It's been a part of the human condition since before we were human.
Living in groups--and people are very much social creatures--means there are rules you follow that you didn't necessarily decide on, or ultimately you get kicked out of the group and probably don't continue your genetic line.
Left unqualified, that's kind of a silly claim to make--it sounds good to some but doesn't really get us anywhere.
We don't know what the circumstances of the interview were, though. It easily could be a minimum wage job, and the other people just found something else.
In those other cases, was the offering better than other companies in the area? Was there a compelling reason to choose that company over the others, and yet a majority of applicants still didn't show up to interviews?
