How do you treat the poor?

There are two political camps in the nation, and most of the world, today. Each says they are taking care of the poor. Each claims to be compassionate, so what is the difference.  As I see it the two factions have a different way of treating the poor.

The Conservative View:

The poor are people, just like you and I, they need to be respected. We all have access to the goods from Nature, they are equally available to all, one only needs to avail themselves to them through labor.  We do not harvest food crops unless we have planted and watered them. Each person is entitled to enjoy the fruits of their labor, this means that some may attain more if they labor more. It is not greedy to possess and appreciate what ones' hard work has acquired.

A conservative tells a poor person, I will give you a job, I cannot pay you very much at the beginning, but you will be able to work your way up, and earn more as time goes by: a concept known as upward mobility.  It is always hard at first, but with much hard work, training, experience, and time even the lowest can move up. Through a job the indigent gain self-respect, knowledge, confidence, reputation, and private property.

Natural law allows for one to accumulate wealth, and as long as he does not allow what he can accumulate to be of no use to himself or anyone else, then there is no limit to what he can procure.  In other words, if I work on a farm and grow tomatoes, I am allowed to eat as many tomatoes as I want, I am allowed to can as many tomatoes as I can. I am also able to barter with others to access what I do not have myself. And being able to save for the future is not only right, it is admirable.

This philosophy has been extolled by John Locke, Cicero, Thomas Paine and the Founding Fathers. It is not possible to demand that human nature change to accommodate society. Society needs to account for human nature and adapt it to the betterment of society.

The Progressive View:

The poor are people, just like you and I, they need to be taken care of. Those of us who have taken advantage of the goods that Nature has given us, need to share our bounty with everyone fairly. No one person or group should be allowed to hoard their yield, the whole of the goods that Nature provides are for the benefit of all in society. Not everyone is capable of attaining the same access to Nature, so those who have greater capability must give up the excess that they can access to give to those who cannot.

The progressive tells the poor person, I am sorry you do not have the same access, you can go to the government and they will give you what they think you need. You shouldn't have to work to provide for yourself, you are entitled to certain basic needs, including shelter, water/food, and (under current era thinking) health care, education, clothing, safety, unionization, reproduction, affirmative action, and tolerance.

No one person or group is allowed to have anything private, everything (including offspring, life, work, and even your identity) belongs to the state and the state will divvy it up "fairly." The state is the only entity that understands what is for the good of society, and those who make up the state determine what "fair" distribution is. When everyone is given their needs, there is no necessity for further striving or excess. The whole of human society will recognize that and will conform to the constraints of the statists for the good of society.

A philosophy borrowed heavily from Thomas Moore, Plato, Marx, Machiavelli and Hobbes.  It is necessary for man to change his nature to accommodate society. Only when all men are provided for equally will there no longer be any contentions between parties.



The future of the world is the treasure in this prize-fight. On one side is Freedom, the other side Slavery. I for one will choose the path of freedom.

The Little Engine that could NOT!

We have heard a lot lately about how the economy needs an overhaul (OWS is basing their whole movement on the fact that capitalism doesn't work), and the progressives (Obama and company) are just the ones to initiate us the change we need to make our economy run more efficiently.

Let's look at the economy as an engine that drives our nation, with sufficient fuel it is an efficient mechanism to get our nation moving. For the last 2 hundred years we have run our engine on capitalism (gasoline), and it has been doing a pretty good job of running the nation. We have had good times and bad times, and fuel shortages and booms, but through it all, the gasoline that we have been running our nation on has done its job. The American economy has purred along pretty self sufficiently for a couple of centuries.

But for about the last 100 years or so the progressives decided that gasoline (the fuel we use to operate our economy) is inefficient, that it is not the best fuel to run our engine on. They make all kind of crazy claims, like the supply of gasoline will run out soon, so we need to find alternative fuel. A progressive never met an alternative fuel source that he didn't like. Solar, wind, Geo-thermal, electric, bio-fuel, ethanol (Socialism, communism, fascism, sustainable development, whatever title they are using now), just to name a few with the progressive stamp of approval.

Unfortunately, none of these alternatives can produce the same result as the gasoline we currently use. But the progressives still claim that gasoline is inefficient so we cannot use our supply at all, instead we need to find something else to run our country on. Capitalism, they say is the bane of society, it rewards some and punishes others, so we cannot use it any longer to fuel the economy because it is "unfair".

And their way of encouraging use of "alternative fuels" is to raise the taxes on gasoline (tax the rich) so the price gets so high that no one can live their lives. This is the progressive way of enforcing its agenda on the population, make whatever they don't want so expensive that the citizens cannot afford to run their own lives on the substance. But what is the alternative fuel that the progressives have championed? What they are proposing is run our nation on water (figuratively of course).

They have not come up with a new engine design, they have not come up with a way of converting our current engine to other fuels, instead they INSIST that we simply stop using what has worked (inefficient as it is) for the last couple of centuries. Most OWS occupiers don't have any idea for a replacement economic system, they only insist that capitalism doesn't work and needs to be destroyed.

Slowly they have been introducing their new "fuel" into the engine, they took over the education system, and the engine ran fine. So they took over the environment, and the engine began to sputter, they took over the entertainment industry and the media, and the engine started huffing and sputtering. Now they are trying to take over the courts, the government, and change the "fuel" by proxy, and what is the result? Our engine has pretty much stopped working.

And their response is to blame the gasoline. After all, gasoline is inefficient, it doesn't produce equal results across all passengers, some engines got better gas mileage than others, so....... because it isn't equally distributed, we have to do away with gasoline. Gasoline is BAD! And we need to run our engine on water from now on, because water is more "fair."

But have they come up with a different, more efficient, engine? They only have theories of how an engine can run on water. Have they proven that our current engine can run on water? Every time it has been tried in real life, it has failed miserably. We know that gasoline will run the engine, but they think that by demonizing the gasoline, they will cause the engine to run more efficiently? HUH!

Motto of the story: NO you can't!!!!