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Does heroin qualify as a nice thing? Most of the people addicted to it would probably say so.
One reason most people don't think the state should subsidise people's heroin addictions is because consistent heroin use will inevitably kill the user, or at the minimum destroy their life in every meaningful sense.
Once you accept that it's wrong to subsidise someone else's independent decision to destroy their own life with drugs (perhaps because they're too stupid, through no fault of their own, to know better), it follows that the specific drug they use to do so is almost beside the point. Why would paying someone to kill themselves with heroin not be acceptable, but paying them to kill themselves with alcohol would be A-OK? Why not alcohol, but fast food? Why not fast food, but gambling? Why not gambling, but prostitutes?
That giving poor people money so that they can feed, house and clothe themselves and be fruitful and multiply is the kind, decent thing to do sounds sensible enough on paper. The trouble is that it's remarkably difficult to ensure they will use the money to ensure those needs are met, rather than using it to satisfy base urges which will kill them or destroy their lives.
Point of order: this is not true. There used to be long-term functional heroin addicts. There aren't anymore because you for the most part can't reliably buy heroin anymore; pharma companies don't generally sell to addicts, while drug dealers sell improperly-diluted fentanyl as heroin (and that will inevitably kill you).
This is not to say that heroin will definitely not destroy your life, or that it won't kill you if you're a moron or getting it from somebody who cuts it by wildly-varying amounts (its drug interaction chart is also terrible). But functional heroin addicts can exist in a way that functional methamphetamine addicts essentially can't (due to the brain damage).
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I can respect that line of argument! But I think you're giving WhiningCoil too much credit. What he said (in a mocking, ironic way) was "the moral thing to do is to feed, clothe and house them". I don't think there is any non-strained reading of his post that rounds out to "it would of course be good to actually feed, clothe and house them, the problem is that programs meant to achieve these things will instead have various unintended negative consequences".
I don't want to put words in @WhiningCoil's mouth. I, for one, would be more than happy to house, feed, clothe etc. poor people in the post-Singularity, post-scarcity gay luxury space communism future that surely awaits us. That society being, of course, the only society in which your policy proposal would actually work, and which wouldn't impose horrific externalities and create perverse incentives for every inhabitant therein.
If I had to parse @WhiningCoil's comment, he was scoffing at the idea that feeding, housing, clothing etc. poor people is the moral thing to do in our universe, with all of its attendant restrictions, limitations and trade-offs. I know that you think the correct approach is to imagine what the right thing to do would be if there were no constraints, and then try to get as close to that target as possible, given the constraints placed upon us. I know because you explicitly told me:
Fair enough. But the thing is: imagining what the right thing to do would be in a universe with no constraints really isn't that hard. Utopias are a dime a dozen, specifically because they skip over all those difficult problems that real life imposes upon us. In light of this, most people (myself included) prefer to just skip the imagining-what-to-do-in-a-universe-without-constraints step, and instead focus on trying to decide the best course of action in our universe, with the constraints we are operating under. But you seem convinced that unless we go through the motions of announcing "this is what the right thing to do would be [in the counterfactual universe with no constraints, limitations or trade-offs]... however, given that we live in a universe with constraints, limitations or trade-offs-"
Dude. We KNOW we live in a universe with constraints, limitations and trade-offs. That's why we're discussing optimal solutions in light of those constraints, rather than wasting our time with navel-gazing on what the right thing to do would be without them. I'm sure I can't be alone in thinking this insistence that we go through the motions of determining what the right thing to do would be in a counterfactual universe with no constraints seems sort of... performative? Do we have to say grace before eating our dinner? Must we do the land acknowledgement before we discuss optimal property tax rates? Do we have to listen to the elevator pitch for your fantasy novel before we can talk about whether or not performing a double mastectomy on a teenage girl is a good idea?*
I know, I know, I know: if we don't reflexively go through the motions of imagining a utopia, we won't notice when we've accidentally created a dystopia. Or as you put it:
But frankly, I don't think anyone here is at risk for advocating the latter position; some of the most moral and decent people I've ever met have been those most acutely aware of the very real trade-offs and constraints life places upon us (while some of the most selfish and inconsiderate were those who spent much of their waking life in hypothetical utopias); and I think your belief that imagining hypothetical utopias is the thing that prevents you from endorsing the democide of starving Ethiopians is both untrue from a psychological perspective and tremendously self-serving.
*My God, imagine if every profession was like this:
Oncologist: In an ideal world, your husband would never have developed prostate cancer. But in our world, he has, and here are your treatment options.
Police officer: In an ideal world, your wife would never have been murdered. But in our world, she has been, and we have a good idea of who did it.
Engineer: In an ideal world, this bridge would never have collapsed. But in our world, it has, and forty-six people are believed to have been killed.
First of all, I do want thank you for the elaborate reply, and especially for quoting past posts of mine. Maybe it's strange to thank someone for remembering past points you made just so that they can continue to disagree with them but I do find it earnestly validating, and a credit to this forum as a discussion space, to be able to have a debate with that level of engagement, without having to start every argument from scratch.
Well, what can I say? This started with WhiningCoil deriding the very idea of clothing, feeding and housing the disadvantaged, with no caveats. For all your attempts to justify and soften his statement, that fact does not fill me with the same confidence. By no means do I think such people - "ghouls" in my fanciful terminology above - are a majority here, even among the more far-right posters. But they do exist. I know this because they frequently boast about their ghoulishness, sneering about universalist altruism being a pathological, contemptible, or just literally incomprehensible impulse whenever the opportunity arises. I'm not trying to start a witch-hunt - when you say that's not where you stand I'm happy to believe you! I'm just gesturing at all the people wearing big conspicuous pointy hats and handing out entry vouchers for the next satanic mass.
I think perhaps you've slightly misunderstood what I was advocating. I didn't mean that in any given dilemma you should literally stop and ask yourself "what would
Jesusmy omnipotent transhuman future self with infinite resources do?". I think the Utopia-designing is a useful implementation of the kind of abstract thinking you have to do to formulate principles - to create a framework of moral philosophy, coin a system of values, whatever you want to call it. Indeed, the post you linked clarifies that I think this is something you should do when engaged in formulating principles, not what you should do every time you want to solve a specific policy question. Arguments I participate in on this forum just keep coming back to this kind of thought experiment partly because I don't have the benefit of an already-established share moral framework with the people I argue with even when we're talking about policy; and partly because a lot of those arguments are questions of moral philosophy where we fight about principles, not pragmatic policy debates, owing to us all being a bunch of geeks who enjoy abstract thinking in our off-time, not policy wonks with actual object-level debates to really sink our teeth into in a systematic way.I would also object strongly to the claim that it's "self-serving". I have found this kind of thinking a useful steering mechanism for my conscience, and it has driven me on many occasions to do good in the world in material ways that cost me, but which, looking back, I'm proud of. That doesn't preclude you thinking that I'm an anomaly and the average person shouldn't do it because they'll get lost in their pie-in-the-sky utopias at the expense of actually doing good - but (for what it's worth to say it on an anonymous forum with no verifiability) I am not a champagne socialist cooped up in my ivory tower.
Well, that's an outright lie right there, and you know it. What he said was:
That is a very explicit caveat. As he said to you himself, finish the sentence. There's a world of difference between
and
Your refusal to acknowledge this shows the weakness of your hand, you're making a straw man of @WhiningCoil's point, and you should knock it off.
This space is based in large part around the principle of charity: one of the top-line rules literally flagged in the description of this very thread is "Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said." When @WhiningCoil very clearly and explicitly says that feeding, clothing and housing poor people with no strings attached forever is a bad idea specifically because resources aren't infinite, and you immediately jump to the conclusion that he's making a dog-whistle statement and he would be equally opposed to this even in the counterfactual world where resources are infinite — well, that doesn't strike me as a very charitable interpretation of what he said, and I think you would resent having words put in your mouth in this fashion.
In that case, why when @WhiningCoil pointed out that feeding, clothing, housing etc. poor people with no strings attached is a bad idea specifically because resources aren't infinite, did you immediately retort something to the effect that it wouldn't be a bad idea if resources were infinite? How is that a productive contribution to the discussion, when @WhiningCoil had already made the delineations of the point he was making perfectly clear? Again, it just strikes me as self-serving, like you want to give yourself a pat on the back for explicitly stating your belief that, in the counterfactual world where X, we should do Y, and the fact that @WhiningCoil didn't go to the trouble proves that he's a doubleplusungood badthinker.
For clarity's sake: so there were occasions on which you were debating what action to take, you imagined what the hypothetical version of you in a universe with infinite resources would do, and that motivated you to take a particular action? I'm not asking you to doxx yourself, but you could be a little bit more specific? I'm genuinely curious.
I believe you, sincerely.
Ah. Hm. Well look, regarding what @WhiningCoil meant and whether my interpretation was uncharitable/a strawman, what he wrote was:
I had interpreted his tongue-in-cheek restatement of the progressive point of view as two distinct clauses, separated by the comma and the "and". That is,
That is, I took it to be the case that "because resources aren't finite" was only meant to 'go' with the "keep giving more and more forever" bit, and as such, was not intended as a justification or modifier for the basic "feed, clothe and house them" bit. Whereas from the way you italicized "because resources are finite" in your second bullet-point restatement, you clearly interpreted "because resources are(n't) finite" as applying to the whole of the sentence. If I misunderstood WC's syntax here, it was a sincere miscommunication, not strawmanning; and I thought that it was grounds for me to dispute the first half of the sentence, the 'A' clause about the basic feeding-clothing-and-housing, without getting into the weeds of whether or not we should "keep giving them more and more forever" on top of that. I take the point that my reading was perhaps uncharitable, though again, if so, it was an honest mistake.
I deny that "with no caveats" was a lie, though. I did not say "without justification". By "caveats" I meant something of the form "except for [X amount of extremely narrow basic-needs social welfare or whatever]", not a justification for the zero-charity policy. As far as I can see there are no caveats in WhiningCoil's posts, in the sense of stated exceptions to his preferred no-free-stuff policy.
Not precisely. What I meant was that, having in advance taken the time to ask myself what an ideal world would look like, in general, I am able in any given situation to readily compare things-as-they-are to what-the-world-ought-to-be. In any given situation this gives me a strong, almost aching sense of the sheer tragedy of the status quo, and yet at the same time gives me a specific target to aim at, motivating me to do what I can to close the gap in a given narrow area where I do have influence. I don't sit there picturing specific sci-fi scenarios as I'm considering a particular crisis/misfortune, it's just a constant background awareness, kind of like that LW post by Yudkowsky about the badly-designed fire alarm as a constant reminder of "it's not Eliezer Yudkowsky who's wrong, the rest of the planet is mad". Nor am I specifically asking myself what frictionless-transhuman-Wanderer would do about a given problem, so much as what frictionless-transhuman-Wanderer's reality would look like that the problem never arose in the first place, and what that implies about what aspects of the actual status quo should be regarded as problems to be solved. Often this is a more abstract process than imagining specific circumstances, of course; the "worldbuilding" exercise is more a way to crystallize my opinions on things.
But it does give me a sense of… well, let's take a very abstract, pedestrian, non-doxxy example, because again, there are things I volunteer at, work I've done, that are too specific to get into without getting too close to Googlable for comfort. But suppose if I walk past a homeless person, I don't move on like they're something dirty I don't want to step into. Because I don't think of poverty and homelessness as some great inevitability that we just have to live with. A world with zero homelessness and starvation is not just conceivable but something I have conceived, something that lives always within my heart. I look at the beggar and my immediate sentiment is, in a world that had its shit together this guy would be my neighbor. Not a close friend, necessarily, but a neighbor, someone on my street. What would I do for a neighbor who'd abruptly lost his home or all his savings or something? Certainly I wouldn't make myself a beggar and give him everything I've got, but I wouldn't walk past him while avoiding his gaze. I wouldn't just give him a token coin or two, either. No, the least I could decently do is simply ask him straight if there's anything I can do. So (provided the guy is sober enough for conversation) I do! I ask what I can do for him, not in the tone of a patronizing, self-conscious Minister To The Needy but in a familiar, neighborly, casual sort of way. I break out of that arch, let-this-moment-be-over-ASAP vibe that even people who give to the homeless tend to have when dealing with them. And typically they'll tell me, and it'll be something that for someone in my income bracket is perfectly reasonable, something I might have spent on an impulse-purchase myself, something I wouldn't give a second thought to. A warm meal, a new backpack.
And it's a small thing, but it's a small thing that they didn't dare hope for when they strapped in for another cold afternoon spent standing around on a street corner pleading silently for a pittance, and suddenly it's there in their hands. There's just no feeling like this, the feeling that just for a moment something fundamentally wrong with the world has been healed, that just for a minute the guy and I both get to live in the world that has its head screwed on right, the world where mutual assistance is a self-evident "sure thing, man. here, I hope you'll enjoy it" deal rather than something to be begged for, bled for, or even granted in a jarringly mechanical way by some centralized bureaucratic process trying to make up for the crushing Molochness of everything. It's such a wonderful feeling, and it has nothing to do with some self-flagellating death-drive - indeed my approach to existence puts paid to that. I don't feel ashamed or guilty for the nice things I get to enjoy, because I know in my bones that in the Good Universe That We Should All Be Living In If There Was A God Worth A Rat's Ass, I also have all those nice things, and enjoy them uncomplicatedly. There are just more people beside me who enjoy all the same things, because we all should. And if we told the denizens of the World That Should Be about our dear old shithole where half the planet lacks those Nice Things, I know with perfect clarity that the last thing they'd want is for those lucky 'survivors' to feel bad about enjoying what others 'lost' relative to the perfect world.
I'm sorry but I must ask this. How frequently do you pass homeless people that you can take this time to do this? I walk my commute to work each day, down to the very heart of Chicago near the dead center of the loop, a 40 minute walk door to door. In a given day I pass dozens of homeless people, and different ones most days. Your parable about never walking past a homeless person is neat but it just doesn't work like that, I'd never get to work if I did that. The city spends something like $40k/year/homeless person to not solve the problem. It's easy enough to say you'd never walk past someone down on their luck or whatever you want to call the homeless when it's an uncommon occurrence. Forgetting about the cost of helping these people with small acts of kindness, even working efficiently I wouldn't have the time necessary to do this individual care for each one.
And then there is pulling back the camera and not focusing on these vistas of individual charity at the EA perspective and recognizing the festering wounds that are developing nations. Unless you blinker yourself to some kind of "only poverty that I can see counts and I live far away from it" then yes, the fact that resources are finite will quickly assert itself.
It's difficult to answer your question without self-doxxing. Certainly I live somewhere rather smaller and accordingly homeless-saturated than Chicago. The kind of encounter I described is more on the order of a few times a month. It's also worth noting that this is something I do when shopping for groceries or the like, i.e. when I have time to myself; I don't tend to travel on foot when it comes to getting to & off work. I'm talking about the kinds of people you'll find lurking as near to the supermarket as supermarket security will allow, and the like. People at bus stops. Very, very occasionally, people who knock at my door.
But in any case, yes, obviously this doesn't work if you encounter ten beggars every single day. The point of the anecdote is not "never walk past a homeless person" but "never walk past a homeless person just because you screen out their existence as a neutral fact of the universe". If you can't help then you can't help; I wouldn't personally help every single neighbor on my street if every house but mine got rubbled overnight, either.
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Why, specifically, a neighbor? Out of sheer statistical likelihood, this is extremely improbable. He would almost certainly be one of the billions of people in the world you never met and never will.
I have a hard time believing any of this interaction you are describing actually happened, because this reads like fiction. How do you know what they hoped for and what went through your minds? You didn't, you're simply writing a morality play with yourself as the altruistic moral savior of humanity.
I certainly understand the impulse to want to make the world a marginally nicer place, but I do it by doing things for friends and family and actual neighbors. I do it for people I know personally who are more blameless than not for their own misfortune. Because I know in my bones that no matter how good the world is, yes, even in literal Star Trek Utopia, there will inevitably be some shitty people in it, utility monsters who intuitively victimize themselves of their own free will, and if I spend my time enabling their shittiness, all I've probably done is make the world a marginally worse place. The beautiful thing is my vision of ethical behavior also universalizes, because if everyone tends to their own garden as well as that of the people they personally know, it's only the antisocial who are excluded from the benefits of society, which is just.
IME, beggars hereabouts are either professional panhandlers, or conspicuously poor people who will ask for money to buy food but refuse offers of food. (My dad watched one immediately take the gifted money and rush into the liquer store, socks and no shoes). Even if the pros are bums rather than downtrodden, they at least know that gifted food means more of their alms go to something else. There's two axes, I guess—functionality and malice—and the problem is that the tails of each dominate, and the malicious above a certain level of functionality are better at pretending to be more benign.
Certain levels of disfunctional warrant institutional care. Above a certain level of malice, policing is required. The window of homelessness that is not covered by these has widened dramatically with the closing of asylums and the defanging of police, meaning that the tails kind of ruin it for the rest of the homeless, who already have it bad enough!
There are public long-term care facilities for sufficiently disfunctional adults in some areas in the US. Since I work at one, I am contractually obligated not to opine on whether or not people should use their services. I will say the state should just buy some Roombas, FFS.
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Obviously I can only guess. Though for what it's worth I didn't necessarily mean to imply that the target of such small acts of kindness are thinking of the situation in the same terms I am, so the only real guess about the recipient's unknowable mind-state is that they didn't expect that they'd meet someone willing to spend double-digit sums on them out of the blue rather than chickenfeed, and I don't think this is an unreasonable or overly romanticized assumption.
In terms of emotionless fact, the interaction I am describing (and it's an abstracted summary of many, not a direct account of a single one) is "homeless guy approaches me/addresses me as I'm walking around town, asking for a bit of cash; I reply in more than one-word sentences and ask them what, in fact, they need, possibly telling them I was on my way to a nearby store if relevant; over a few sentences they actually come up with something that they'd need that is easy for me to purchase, I purchase it and hand it to them". I don't see what's so hard to believe about that. If you just think that the person I give stuff to must be thinking something more like "har, har, what a sucker" than "yay fundamental human brotherhood, I'd do the same for you if our positions were revesed", well, sure, some of them at least, but I don't really care. The fact that they got the stuff still means I made their day better, which is what I wanted to achieve. If you believe that beggars wouldn't make such reasonable requests in response to the open-ended offer… again, sure, some of them shoot for the moon, but I don't blame them. And by and large, beggars can't be choosers is an expression for a reason; I've never met one who when I replied that "an iPhone" is maybe out of my price range here, failed to back down to a more achievable idea.
Oh, I do that too, which is in fact the answer to "why, specifically, a neighbor" - because the level to which I care about and help my neighbors is something that is already an established pattern of behavior I can default to.
I do not feel the same. I believe very heartily that a world in which everyone has everything they want is superior to one in which only the virtuous do (although I'm comfortable with prioritizing the virtuous if it's necessary to prioritize someone, a la this SSC post).
Have you ever consider that what the unvirtuous want could be zero sum with what the virtuous want? Say, for example, to murder me, bath in my blood and rape my wife. Or maybe break into random homes and stab children to death cause YOLO why not?
Evil exists and requires planning around. Not enabling because you want everyone to get what they want and be happy.
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I think that your 'ghouls' are often (not always, psychopaths do exist but they are quite rare) simply people who have been subjected to the 'hostage puppy' attack so many times, they are tired of empathizing. There's a great thread about it here if you're on twitter:
https://x.com/goblinodds/status/2010954724544074194?s=20
This essentially forces people to either lose, or accept being an asshole. Progressives have been using this tactic to great effect for centuries now. Many on the right are simply done folding to this sort of empathy attack.
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Finish the sentence.
Well, do you think that giving them as much as actually possible in our world with finite resources would be all fine and dandy? Somehow I didn't get that impression, and that makes the hyperbole a petty snipe irrelevant to the argument.
Actually possible still just rounds off to everything. Give me a limiting principle besides "Gosh, I'm a heckin' nice person and I don't understand why you are being so cruel."
Let me put it like this. You seem set on never ever buying nice scented candles. Indeed, you seem to think that scented candles are a plague upon mankind, no one should buy them, and their manufacturing should be banned.
And when I query you on why you dislike candles so much, you cry out: "oh, so I should spend $3600 a month on candles, should I? I should let my family starve because all I buy is candles? I should act as though I have an unlimited bank account to be spent on candles, is that it?!"
"Well, no," I reply. "I'm not asking you to spend everything you've got on candles, let alone more than you've got. I just find the extent of your opposition to candles worrying. It'd be one thing to say that, having limited resources, there are other things you'd rather spend your money on instead; but you remain unwilling to address why it would seem so outrageous to you for a person to purchase even a couple of candles; why you think the very act makes them the unknowing slaves of Big Candle."
"Then give me a cold hard figure!" you say again. "Tell me exactly how many candles you think I should make room in my budget for! Or there's no point in engaging with you"
This is where we are now. So please try to understand: I am not arguing for a particular policy on candle-buying, here. I am trying to get to the bottom of your absolute hostility to candles as a concept. I am chasing down a nagging feeling that maybe there's something odd about your nose that makes you find the smell of scented candles disgusting rather than pleasant and soothing. The amount of candles bought is not in question. I know you claim that it is, because you argue "my opposition to candles is just a perfectly rational wariness of the slippery slope where if I start buying one candle a year, pretty soon I'll be bankrupting myself with unlimited candle purchases", but this is not how someone with a normal reaction to the smell of candles - someone who recognized that all else being equal a scented candle is a nice thing to have - would think about that question at all, even one who ultimately decides against that particular expense in a given situation.
I think "wanting everyone on Earth, regardless of their personal characteristics, to have basic safety and comfort" is a normal human preference to have, similar to "scented candles smell nice", and that a person who is not a ghoul is interested in making room in their budget for getting us closer to that as a matter of course. I think leftists like me would be prepared to have all sorts of grown-up conversations about trade-offs and practicalities with people who share that basic desire to do good for its own sake as one of their values (not, I repeat, necessarily the only thing they value), but that this is rendered more difficult by the nagging suspicion that some of the people trying to work their way into those conversations on the pretense that they're talking about the practicalities of trading various goals against one another are, in fact, ghouls.
It seems like you're already bidding a tactical retreat from wanting to subsidise them creating more humans in addition to providing them with food, clothes and shelter.
I didn't intend to. I would happily defend the claim that as a sheer gut-level question of empathy, a vast majority of people would in fact consider it mean to stop someone who wants children from having them.
I'm taxed so much supporting other people's kids, I haven't been able to afford having as many kids as I would have liked.
Solve that riddle in your "lets just give everyone as much as they need" moral system.
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The question "how many candles do I have to buy before I can stop" is not an issue because the answer is zero. Is the answer to "how much do I have to give to the poor and unfortunate to be considered not selfishly evil" also zero?
I think it is - it's the answer to "how much would I want the poor and unfortunate to get, in a vacuum where it's no skin off mine or anybody else's nose" that should be >0.
That seems like an extremely bad question to ask. Do you interrogate all your moral intuitions off a similar framing, starting with what you wish was true and working from there? And note that you are treating "poor" and "unfortunate" as philosophical primitives, states that simply exist ex nihilo.
Suppose I assert that all humans deserve justice. How does this interact with your "how much would I want the poor and unfortunate to get, in a vacuum where it's no skin of mine or anyone else's nose"? Because my understanding is that what some humans deserve from justice is swift, merciless death.
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So TLDR: Asking for a limiting principle makes me a bad person, so you aren't going to give me one because bad people don't deserve answers.
No. I'm not giving you one because that's not the topic of this conversation. The topic of this conversation was confirming whether you are a ghoul, and, provided that you did indeed turn out to be a bona fide ghoul, trying to make you understand that this is unusual.
(It's by no means impossible or worthless to engage in political discussions with ghouls, nor to peacefully cohabit with ghouls. Ghouls certainly deserve to be happy like everybody else. But very bad things happen when ghoulishness is obfuscated to the extent that half the population start accepting policy agendas set by ghouls and taking only things ghouls value into account, without noticing the missing "benevolence" term in the calculations.)
You know what, my first comment was excessive, I apologize, but let me also clear some things up.
I don't want nobody to have candles. I want a candle too! But I've spend the last 40 years of my life paying for candles for other people, and bafflingly, have been unable to afford one myself.
Lets drop the candle metaphor for one minute.
I didn't become a home owner until damned near 40. I didn't qualify for any assistance, I had to go it the slow way, saving as much as I could. Savings that got diminished year after year to inflation because the government keeps driving up the national debt on wars and welfare. Meanwhile, the government also subsidized home buying for the needy more and more. Not for me, I can go fuck myself, but for everyone else. Driving prices further and further out of my reach.
One year I asked for, and got, a big honking raise, saved enough in a desperate push to put me over the finish line, and bought a home with a 75 minute (one way) commute.
I wanted my children to grow up in a community like I did, where effectively nobody is ever murdered. Unfortunately, in the name of being heckin' nice people and making sure everyone (except me) is happy, governments keep losing their damned minds and viewing it as some sort of moral imperative to keep insane violent felons on the streets as much as possible. Their happiness and my happiness is truly zero sum.
I wanted my children to get the same sort of education I did, with relatively good and safe schools. Unfortunately, in the name of being heckin' nice people, that went right out the window. We invited the entire third world, with gangs and drugs and the occasional dismemberment murder into our school districts whole sale. They are "sanctuaries" now. You couldn't pay me enough to subject my child to that environment. So I'm effectively taxed again finding alternative arrangements. It's causing me to have less children than I would like.
So here I am, deeply struggling to maintain a standard of living I grew up with, every public institutions inhospitable to me, every public good denied me, and then people tell me "Well, we should still give as much as is actually possible". Fuck, I've had enough stolen from me as is and you want more? How many more years of my life do I need to waste chasing a moving goalpost while others just get it handed to them? How many more children will I give up bringing into this world because so much has been taken from me and given to others than I can't afford them, while others just thoughtless pound them out and then ask me to support their kids? Like I wouldn't like kids of my own that will need support.
You can only call me a ghoul, because you have no idea how much has already been stolen.
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