No the issue is that people like your acquaintance rely on other people living life in a way they don't want to in order to subsidize their preferred way of life. I'm all for homesteading by yourself away from society, but the moment you walk into a homeless shelter asking for a meal funded by the people in the rat race that you like to condemn and opt out of, I'm afraid my opinion starts to matter.
> the moment you walk into a homeless shelter asking for a meal funded by the people in the rat race that you like to condemn and opt out of, I'm afraid my opinion starts to matter.
I'm not sure it matters that much.
The number of people doing this is so vanishingly small that I'd characterize your opinion on the matter as peevish.
Insisting that people be consistent and that everything always be fair a regressive trait.
No. I characterize someone choosing to be homeless who does not have to be (the situation described above) and yet depending on others to feed him as unjust, yes. It would be equally unjust of me -- a perfectly able-bodied human adult -- to ask for charity as well.
This is not about unchosen homelessness and poverty; this is about people shirking responsibility because they don't like it. Stop changing the topic.
> It's the lowest stage of moral development to insist on rigid adherence to each and every rule.
No. It's simply not paying attention to people whose philosophy is inherently duplicitous.
> There are people playing by the rules doing immensely more damage to the world and to the economy.
Where did I say this man was damaging the economy? All I pointed out was that his philosophy (living away from the rat race is a good thing) is inconsistent. Please don't change the goalposts. I was having a discussion on living with integrity (having your actions align with your purported values), not economic damage / benefit.
> I was having a discussion on living with integrity (having your actions align with your purported values), not economic damage / benefit.
I don't know you from anybody but I'm one hundred percent sure that you live with contradictions to your own values, no matter how carefully cultivated and adhered to.
I'm saying this to disparage you, because the same applies to me. In fact one of the hallmarks of humans is that they are inconsistent in their beliefs, morals values and so on.
If we were not inconsistent, then everything would be frozen in place and no change would be possible, so I see it as a good thing.
> I don't know you from anybody but I'm one hundred percent sure that you live with contradictions to your own values, no matter how carefully cultivated and adhered to.
Years ago I read an interview by Nolan Bushnell or someone like that. He was asked what he did about unproductive engineers and his answer was 'an unproductive engineer is his managers problem because fundamentally I don't care' He went on to say that the problem is negative productive engineers or worse managers. While an unproductive engineer wastes his salary, a negative productive employee destroys the work of many people.
I take that to heart. Big picture a bum costs society basically nothing as long as he's not actively making trouble. Meanwhile you have successful people consuming huge amounts of resources while destroying immense amounts of societal value. See Sears and Eddie Lampert.
> Big picture a bum costs society basically nothing as long as he's not actively making trouble
That's because you think of society in purely monetary terms. Socially, a bum that needs not be a bum, but chooses to be one, reduces social cohesion, makes people distrustful of necessary welfare programs, and unnecessarily inflates the homeless numbers.
Most Western countries could eliminate homelessness in one day if it was just about the beds in shelters. People opt for a straet instead of a shelter mainly because: it may not be safe there ( drugs, alcohol, aggressive behaviour) or they are on the other side of the spectrum, such as drug addicts, mentally ill and etc. Usually a holistic approach is needed.
Yeah if it was just about having enough beds somewhere then we wouldn't have issues. But there is a lot of mental health, addiction, and trauma -- often feeding off each other, e.g. people with metal health issues turn to drugs to self medicate -- and that requires more than just a place to keep them.
In a lot of cases it's more about harm reduction (to themselves, and to the local community) then getting them fixed in a home. Cuz you're not going to rehab some of these people.
The tiny handful of people who are homeless because "they don't like the rules, man" are statistically irrelevant.
Maybe he felt he had already contributed enough to the establishment in his prior, more conventional situation. Would probably take a lot of $3 meals to change that balance substantially.
"Apparently the guy just wanted to live this way because he was sick and tired of the life he had earlier."
Anyways, do we want as a society do the maths if someone has the right to "profit" from our infrastructure? Isn't the main goal of a society to support a wide range of lifestyles?
Thats not a rhetorical question, i mean it. There is balance to be struck between enabling everyone to live their life like they want to and having a standardized flow of goods and services that makes a "good life" possible for everyone.
In this case, i would say it is a thing that modern society should be able to handle and we shouldn't look after every penny. Those people are in the very minority and if they need help we should be able to provide them with the necessary things. But that is only an opinion of mine and there is a discussion to be had regarding the handling of those cases.
Do trust-fundies bug you the same way? Granted, someone put up capital that came from somewhere to seed their lifestyle, but they're quite literally living off others' labor, too.
Putting that aside, a lot of folks seems far more attuned to 'cheating' at the very bottom of society than the (much more damaging) cheating elsewhere. Is someone eating almost-expired grocery store waste a bigger imposition on others than fraud? Tax evasion?
> Do trust-fundies bug you the same way? Granted, someone put up capital that came from somewhere to seed their lifestyle, but they're quite literally living off others' labor, too.
No, because they're supposed to be living off of daddy and mummy's labor, not mine. You see, trust fund kids have a trust fund, but the people who provided that money (mom and dad) typically have a lot of say in how its used. It's the same principle here. If a trust fundie went to a public soup kitchen, then yes I want a say, because that's my money.
Otherwise, no I don't really care that someone gave someone else money. Not my business. If the 'wild' guy in the comment found an independent patron to provide him everything he needed, I'd say go for it -- that's a great business to be in honestl.
> Putting that aside, a lot of folks seems far more attuned to 'cheating' at the very bottom of society than the (much more damaging) cheating elsewhere.
That's not true at all. You just haven't made a proper comparison. Trust fund kids aren't stealing anything from me. That money is not mine. It was their ancestor's and now it's theirs. If they were taking my money then that would be unfair.
> Is someone eating almost-expired grocery store waste a bigger imposition on others than fraud?
I have no idea how this relates
> Tax evasion?
Tax evasion -- not paying taxes that are owed -- is against the law, and ought to be prosecuted, including with jail time. I don't think that my country (America) typically goes easy on those who flout tax law, but in general, I support law enforcement universally, and I would support cracking down on those breaking tax law and building more jails to house them.
>I don't think that my country (America) typically goes easy on those who flout tax law, but in general, I support law enforcement universally, and I would support cracking down on those breaking tax law and building more jails to house them.
Again the poor are scrutinized more in this area than the rich. The rich move their money offshore and use expensive lawyers and social connections to make this happen.
Insisting on locking up poor people for tax evasion is a terrible idea, most of them don't owe much tax anyway. It would cost you more of your money to lock them up than it saves.
Once society really starts to go after the rich for tax evasion, then arguments like yours might become more credible, but even then I'd never be in favour of locking up poor people for unpaid taxes. It's disproportionate and counterproductive.
Sometimes people are going to cheat, and it won't seem fair. It's not worth disturbing your peace of mind over it.
> Again the poor are scrutinized more in this area than the rich. The rich move their money offshore and use expensive lawyers and social connections to make this happen
Source? For a long time the irs didn't investigate taxes for discrepancies under a few hundred thousand which seems to favor the poor.
The 'tax evasion' you cite is (moving money) is legal. It is not tax evasion. No one, rich or poor, should be punished for doing something legal at the time they did it. Congress should change their laws
OK, thanks. But this confuses something: we're not talking about me giving money to my kid, we're talking about my hypothetical kid. My choices can't tell us anything about the moral character of my kid.
I submit that the kid and the voluntarily impecunious are morally identical - neither is personally adding any value, they're exploiting arrangements neither of them made to continue their lifestyle while producing nothing.
Also, food banks != the state. The one I volunteer at is a church distributing food that's nearly expired, donated by stores who would have tossed it otherwise. It appears win-win-win to me and is taking nothing from you. Do you have a problem with that?
The donations are typically given with the understanding they are helping those in need, not those who want to be in need.
> The one I volunteer at is a church distributing food that's nearly expired, donated by stores who would have tossed it otherwise. It appears win-win-win to me and is taking nothing from you. Do you have a problem with that?
Then why doesn't they guy simply to go to the store and offer to take their almost expired food? My guess is that they wouldn't give it to him because they'd want him to pay. The food is given to food banks for those in need. Someone not really in need taking it lowers the amount available for those truly in need, artificially signals to donators that more food is needed, and violates the consent of those giving the food for the truly destitute.
That the state spends money to help the destitute and that some of those might be not-quite-destitute and therefore by some logic defrauding the state really seems to irk people in ways that always surprise me. As you say, why focus on the pennies involved when waste in the military (at least in the US) and other fraud against the government (such as Medicare fraud) is magnitudes more?
The main defender of this point would've been better off taking the money earned during the time writing his comment, donating it to a shelter (because a lot of charity is not government funded), and never thinking about the issue again. Yet you can just see how it gets under his skin.
You mention various other free loaders as if I don't think they deserve condemnation as well. However, I'm not going to hijack a thread about some homeless-by-choice bum to talk about that, because I like to stay on-topic.
> but the moment you walk into a homeless shelter asking for a meal funded by the people in the rat race that you like to condemn and opt out of, I'm afraid my opinion starts to matter.
Well it's a fair trade off. Much of land has been commandeered by the state for the people in the rat race. So the homeless getting a meal from a homeless shelter doesn't seem so hypocritical.
