**** Elections thread *****

[Poopadoop]

What you're saying is that it's greedy to want to keep to yourself what you worked for, while it's not greedy to be so unproductive that you get to the point of starvation, which then forces you to beg for money off those who are productive.

This is why spoon thinks the left are insane, and he's not a million miles away. I prefer the term "deluded" to "insane", but we're splitting hairs.

And I'm someone who believes unemployment benefits should exist. Through all my years of claiming benefits, I've never felt I was acting morally. I think benefits are essential because without them we'd have slums with horrible crime. That doesn't mean to say that I think benefits are moral. They're not. They punish hard working people to reward the incapable and unwilling. It's just that if these people were left ot fend for themselves, the punsihment for hard working people would be worse than simple tax... it would be an unsafe environment.

Just because person A is rich and person B is starving, doesn't mean person A is the greedy cunt. He's just better at life. Fine, give some money to the sucker who failed, but don't pretend that the starving person is sitting on top of Mount Morality.

Why do you automatically assume the starving person deserves their fate and brought it on themselves? You're making a moral judgment about a (hypothetical) person you know nothing about besides that they're starving.

Similarly, why do you automatically assume the billionaire deserves their riches and earned it through hard work?

Moreover, if we're talking about how to define greedy (which I was), then the person who already has more than they need and not just wants to keep it, but have even more of it while others suffer, is by definition greedy.

Conversely, the person who doesn't have enough to survive, and wants enough to survive, by definition cannot be called greedy. They may be immoral for other reasons if e.g., they fit your stereotype of the poor lazy person who wants to give nothing to society and be looked after by others, but that doesn't equate to being 'greedy'.

None of which is relevant to the larger question of income redistribution apart from highlighting that Sowell butchered the language to make the hypothetical poor person the bad guy for wanting what he needs, and the hypothetical rich person the good guy for wanting more than he needs. Unless you base your morality solely on what a person has at the moment (i.e., poor people wanting more are bad, rich people having more are good), you can't make this argument work.