Dexter Morgan

I see a lot of people making differences between "brick and mortar" businesses built from scratch and "Wall Street" millionaires, without it really being acknowledged that a million dollars sitting in either of their bank accounts is . . . theirs.

I'm sorry, I simply don't understand where it's my responsibility to take care of anyone besides myself and my family. There's usually always SOME explanation behind why someone is just completely and totally dirt poor, at least more often than poverty is just some unavoidable affliction that unwittingly implants itself in someone's life without there being a thing that person can do about it. If you are a single person with absolutely no education, no wealthy family, you can still manage to find yourself a job and support yourself. If you have a spouse, he or she can do the same to add more to the household.

It's when shit like having kids comes into the picture. If your ass is broke, why would you have children? Since we're no longer an overly agrarian society, not many people have children to help out on the farm. And even if we DID, you still have to account for the several years in the beginning when a child contributes absolutely nothing. Children are an expense. Children are NOT a necessity. So when I see someone wading through a grocery store with three kids and waving around an EBT card, hell YES, I get angry. I have one child, am divorced, with a modest income. You know the one thing I am absolutely NOT going to do? Have more children.

One way in which I agree with liberals: access to abortion. Western civilization should outright CELEBRATE abortion. It should be hailed as the best thing to happen since birth control and sliced bread. More emphasis needs to be placed on not breeding NEARLY as much as we do. I guarantee we'd have a MUCH smaller "need" problem if people didn't continue to look at having children as a "necessity" or an "entitlement". Sure, you may have the reproductive right to have children how and whenever you want, but when does the responsibility of providing for them enter the picture? Shouldn't it be about time to yank out the safety net so that people have to truly THINK about these issues before simply assuming they have this compelling entitlement to breed?

People have the right to do many, many things (and SHOULD have those rights); but that doesn't mean they're absolved of the consequences thereof.

Truly, I don't care how much anyone makes in a year, I don't care how they came by their money (in a legal sense - and even then, I don't care if your money is from selling drugs, but I DO care if you flat-out STOLE your money), whether they scraped to earn every single penny of it, invested, or simply inherited a huge chunk of it; the bottom line is, that is NOT my money, I have absolutely NO entitlement to it whatsoever, and neither does anyone else. No one ever promised me wealth or prosperity, and I think any such promise would be bogus. You have to work for it. And sometimes what work will just manage to make a living, rather than extravagance. At what point does that make Billy Millionaire owe me more of his money? It doesn't.

Life isn't fair. Taking money from one person to give it to another isn't just "unfair", it's completely unjust.

My points should not be taken to mean that I don't believe in charity; I certainly do. And while people are busy throwing rich people under the bus, they ignore that MANY very well-to-do people donate their money, product or time to various charities and outreaches. In fact, Dave Ramsey, the man whose blog was the opening post of this thread, includes that as a part of his wealth-building strategy for people looking to get out of debt. He has a very common sense, no-nonsense approach to building wealth, and at the end of those steps, he talks about charity and paying it forward.

So I totally support private charities and the WILLING donation of money to those less fortunate. It's one of the many things I think the private sector could do MUCH better than the government could - charity/welfare, insurance, home ownership, you name it. Government has become too big and too inefficient and should not deal with redistributing wealth where THEY think it ought to go. If you give people the chance to handle THEIR affairs and needs first instead of taking such a huge portion of their income in taxes, we'd probably SEE a hell of a lot more charity and wealth circulating throughout.

The biggest obstacle to that is, people have such a lack of confidence in both themselves and others that they think that other people (no different from you or me) who simply happen to be in elevated positions are better qualified to make decisions regarding their lives and money than they are themselves. Someone asked another poster earlier if they were anarchist; I'm not anarchist, but I'm surely minarchist. I support the smallest government possible, and believe one should exist only to secure individual liberty and enforce laws that uphold individual liberty. The role of government should never to be take care of its citizens; it should protect us from harm by protecting our liberties, but only so that WE can take care of ourselves.