if we had social workers making sure people wernt cheating, things would be better.
I definitely agree. It's not like I'm saying we should just hand out money to whoever asks for it. But we're cutting social workers and reducing their budget, and any argument in favor of
bigger government is political Self Delete right now, even if the bigger government were somehow cheaper than the smaller government (it can be, depending on how you spend it. for example, hiring more IRS agents would actually bring in more profit than they cost to hire).
You can't bring in right and wrong into an argument. Right and wrong is a matter of opinion. People used to think that cannibalism was a right, in fact some thought divine, act. Nowadays if you eat somebody, you're going to jail for life.
You're right in this case, rightness and wrongness is totally a matter of opinion, and it's my opinion that it's wrong.
At the risk of starting another argument totally tangential to this one, it turns out that right and wrong isn't necessarily just a matter of opinion either. Suppose I were to ask you is it wrong to randomly kill people in the most brutal way you can imagine for no reason at all, unprovoked, just for fun? Most people would probably say yes (although based on your post thus far you may not necessarily agree). Obviously in order to answer yes to this question, you must believe in some concept of rightness and wrongness, relative or universal, biological or moral. There is an entire branch of philosophy devoted to the study of this called
ethics. If we say murder is wrong, ethics asks "now that we have established that murder is wrong, why is it wrong?" If your argument is that God says it's wrong, then there is a divine power that decides things for you. If you say it's because you've deprived them of all the great things that might come later in their life, then you are following another ideology. If you say "well if everyone murdered anyone they wanted then we would die out as a species, we have evolved not to kill each other" then you're following a variation of
Kantian ethics. I can't think of a scenario where you could argue against murder and also not acknowledge some intrinsic "wrongness" of the action and therefore admit the concept of right exists. While what is "good" may be determined by us and it's totally subjective and what's "good" here could be "bad" there, this hardly means the concepts of "good" and "bad" don't exist or don't matter. On a cosmic scale they may be insignificant when the sun evaporates all our oceans in a billion years, or the tidal forces from the sun pull our now venus-like planet into the sun, or the eventual heat death of the universe occurs, or a higher power that you or may not believe in and is otherwise impossible for us to verify the existence of through observation determines that we should no longer exist. But right and wrong, fairness and unfairness, justice and injustice, crime and virtue do matter here and now, and they are very important.
I believe that there is an inherent injustice in baring people from public places even though the changes that would need to be made to the world in order to accommodate them are minor and do not represent a significant loss of the standard of living to you. As to preemptively answer the question of how doing nothing is baring them from anything since they could just go out and buy a wheelchair, it's baring an impoverished economic class through inaction from things that other people in their economic class would be permitted to do, and it's baring them from enjoying the same privilege, that of being able to use public spaces, that you take for granted. For no other reason than "you are poor and you are disabled." I think that this action is inherently unjust, unfair, and vile.
My freedom to not pay for some random person's disability check. I'm being forced to donate to charity basically.
No, you're not being forced to donate to charity. You are being forced to maintain a vital part of motion-impaired transportation infrastructure that is just as important as maintaining other transportation infrastructure, like roads.
Paying a specific person money because they can't walk or something is not the same as allowing access to the building by all people. Paying them the money will not allow them to live the same as everyone else, because they still can't walk. Its basically free medicare for a small group of people who didn't do anything to deserve it.
It's not paying someone money because they can't walk, it's funding a necessary part of public infrastructure which should be usable in some form or another by all. Your money is not being used to make their life like yours. Someone without arms does not have arms, and it's as simple as that. They will always have to do things differently than you even if they get the best prosthetic arms on the market, and we can't afford to do that. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't put a kickplate on doors.
As for "they don't deserve the money," I don't really have any comment other than "well they didn't deserve to have their arms cut off either but there's not a whole lot we can do about that now." They also don't not deserve the money, since they haven't done anything to expressly not deserve it.
Also, I keep laughing at the people who keep kissing your ass every time you post. I don't think you're stupid or anything, but its just funny.
Well thanks I guess. I don't think you're stupid either, nor do I hate you or anything. I just think you're wrong and I think we should keep it at that sort of professional level.
