What should we debate?

I wanna know how many “poor” Americans are actually eating rice and saving everything they can and living 10 deep in cardboard huts and shining shoes and and working at a restaurant and panhandling and pimping themselves daily to try and get the American Dream. Everyone knows you can’t have your dreams without earning them. All those things I just listed are options that are available to anyone who’s willing to put in the hard work to get some money in the bank and start saving.

I figure a kid could start at an early age and set a goal for savings, and by the time he’s done getting his diapers changed and out from under his parent’s wing he should be able to start a small grass cutting company with just a few lawnmowers and a friend or two. With some hard work and smart investing, next thing you know he’s not poor anymore. Poor people just think they’re too good for all these things. They want someone else to just hand them a house and a business and a meal. There’s enough food in America’s trash cans for it to be the case that no poor person should even buy food. Save that money for not being poor and eat the free food that is thrown away by people who can afford to do so. It’s just that sense of entitlement that they all have.

If you think about it on a small scale it makes more sense. Imagine you’re having a lovely Thanksgiving dinner and a police officer comes to your door with a poor person and points a gun at you and says, “you’ve gotta let this person sit at your table and eat just like you’re eating even though he refuses to behave morally and responsibly and take care of himself. If you don’t I’m going to lock you in jail.”

Why are you advocating that it’s my fault when a poor person hasn’t planned properly to ensure that they have a Thanksgiving turkey when the holiday arrives? I don’t think it’s my fault at all. If I’m guilty of anything it’s having enough of a moral compass to be responsible for myself and doing that I should to ensure I have my own turkey when it’s dinner time.

Millions, I’m sure come close enough.

“Everyone” would be very wrong about that. There are billionare children who certainly didn’t earn their billions.

Aren’t Utopian fantasies fun.

Yeah, that’s what YOU figure. Reality figures it differently.

And just how did they get that idea? They weren’t born with it.

That’s illegal in the USA.

Sounds like modern USA.

Well, that’s easy. It works like this:

Let’s say that you were given a young child and you wanted to ensure the child’s deserved wealth when he grew up. So you provide him with a special virtual-realty “wealth-game” that is designed to provide knowledge of how to make money as well as provide conditioning toward aspirations to make money for him to play with as his only game/toy. You also provide for a realm of opportunity wherein he isn’t having to pay every penny he earns to replace every appliance and automobile every two years, insurance for everything he even might care about; medical, auto, home, law suits…, freedom from disabling mental and physical diseases, freedom from con-artists and thieves, an actual capitalistic society (not merely pretending to be), and a reasonable client/customer base for when he grows up a bit more. Then to ensure it all works well, you also provide a stipend for start up capital.

Now if the child did not become wealthy (or at least un-poor), then you didn’t really provide one of those (as a given “by definition” for each item mentioned). So you should certainly expect for him to avoid poverty at least even though he was actually born poor.

But now, what if instead, you provided him with all of the items mentioned but there were 10 indistinguishable games for him to choose from. The probability of him choosing the wealth-game is only 1 out of 10 and the others condition other things likely to not lead to wealth. Now you could only hope for 1 out of 10 chance for him to avoid poverty because he has been conditioned as the games dictate.

In the first case, you have virtually guaranteed wealth. In the second you have 1:10 chance of wealth. If the child chose the wrong one of the 10 games provided, is that a fault in the child?? I don’t think so. He couldn’t know one game from the others. Out of 100 such children, only 10 would become wealthy. 90 of them got screwed.

So who’s fault is it that a naive child can’t discern the “wealth-game” from the “poverty-games”?
And when he has to beg for a Turkey dinner at the age of 40, who’s actual fault was that?

Who provided him with a distraction of poverty games?
Who provided the environment that provided the probability of poor education and inspiration?

How did you define “fault” again?
Fault ≡ That which is the catalyst for negative consequences for a person and is part of the will of the person in question.

It was You who catalyzed the situation when the child had no way to know anything and thereby guaranteed the negative consequences. It was YOUR will to give him too much when he needed more narrow guidance.

You spoiled him with obfuscated choices. The “Fault” was yours.
Give him the damn turkey and pray he doesn’t hate you anyway.

That’s an awful lot of if’s James. But I’m not talking about some hypothetical world. I’m talking about the real world, here in America where a guy can eat good from the trash and panhandle enough money for a low rent place to live. What are you on about all these theoretical games about?

It’s not my fault if a guy wants to play all day and never save. I shouldn’t be responsible for giving him dinner. He had the same chance as me to get his own.

Here is some historical evidence, that’s been around and available to pretty much every society we’ve ever heard of for a long time.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_an … rasshopper

That story proves my point. If the grasshopper wants to sing, then he may starve like most artists. But if he wants to do a little work and delay his gratification by being disciplined and conscientious in his decision making then he wont have to deal with the fact that the ant doesn’t owe him anything and he wont ever have to question who’s fault it is that he lacks dignity because he wont when he can take care of himself.

What do you imagine he can do with the little that he begs for, here in “this great nation”?

That depends, was he your child?

“Equal opportunity” is a logical impossibility. No one ever has “the same chance”. And what it depends on, is what I was talking about, how he was raised and in what environment.
Everyone is born poor. No one dictates the environment they are born into or what rearing they are going to get.
Yet, as explained above, those are what determines the attitude and potential of wealth.

I thought you weren’t talking about a “hypothetical world” from ancient Greece days, but today in the good ole US of A.

A little as 100 years ago, a man could wonder off into the woods and cut a life for himself. Today, he would get shot by the DHS. Today is nothing at all like ancient Greece.

Wrong.

Wronger.

Wrongest.

Bigus.

So you concede?

Yes, I concede that you have no argument.

But was a nice attempt. Thanks for playing. =D>

Thanks for being reasonable. You knew I was gonna win the whole time. You were a good sport about it.

I try to be kind and placate the delusions of the underprivileged.
… well… not always.

You don’t have to thank me. Just use the new knowledge that I gave you in this debate to live a more fulfilling life.

Well, the most important thing is that we all agree on the conclusion.

Exactly. Everyone needs to know that I won.

Can you be more specific?

I see where this is going. Be specific which talking points you wish to debate.

Aren’t you a neo - liberal? Very contradictory with your perceptions here for a so called liberal.

It’s not the 1950’s anymore you know. This is the year 2014 where the United States is on a one way economic ticket to hell.

If you’re going to do this properly I suggest you familiarize yourself with present market conditions within the United States.

I don’t have a political label. So when you say, “so called”, I’m asking, “yeah but only by you”.

It doesn’t matter what decade it is. There’s commerce. You can open an ameritrade account with no minimum deposit. You can panhandle and prostitute yourself. The news is free and you can read it all day if you choose. Then you can use your panhandling money to fund your trading account, and as long as there’s commerce, and price fluctuations, you can make money whether things are going up or down. Current market conditions are that there are a diverse array of investment possibilities such that when one thing goes down something else goes up. Reading that free news can give you clues to when and where these things will happen.

So as long as a person is able to whore themselves, eat from the trash and not spurge 100% of their assets on motels and fast food then they should be able to, with enough hard work to get wherever they want to go. So if they aren’t where they want to be then it’s their fault and no one else’s.