OT: Jibjab, Politics, the Big Bang and more!

[Graeme Dice]

Originally posted by Arryn:
Why? This encourages people to become leeches.

If it actually encouraged people to become "leeches", as you've called them, then the majority of the industrialized world would be populated by these leeches. The reality of the situation is that the vast majority of people _want_ to make it by themselves, and would rather that other people don't support them too much.

The compassionate part of me has sympathy for the elderly and the unfortunate. But the rational side of me thinks: if these folks had been less inept and/or foolish they'd not be in a situation now where they need help from others.

A person can easily be in such a situation through no fault of their own. A person should be allowed to fail, but this failure shouldn't bring them down to the point where they can't maintain the most basic level of care for themselves.

Why should I reward the poor decisions they made in their lives? Example: if someone decides to have 8 children, and cannot afford to feed/clothe/care for more than 1, why must I (in the form of taxes) pay for their stupidity/irresponsibility?

Why isn't compassion for them reason enough?

If you smoke, and get cancer, why should I have to pay a share (in the form of higher insurance costs) for the tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars it'll cost to deal with your foolishness? If you eat like a pig all your life, blimp out, and then get heart disease or colon cancer, why must everyone else be burdened by you?

Everyone else is already burdened by these people, so moving it into a more visible place would probably be a good thing.

Sorry, but people need to be responsible for themselves.

And they still are responsible for themselves. They are not completely responsible for themselves, but no person ever can be.