My argument is as I first stated. Sometimes no matter how hard you try, your circumstances will stay the same, through no fault of your own.

I do accept that there are those in society who benefit from the hard work of others, and I also accept that sometimes it's possible to improve your situation in life. To rise above your poor beginings perhaps.

The thing I don't accept is that it's possible for everyone to do so. For one thing, if everyone did, the economy would crash quicker than you could blink.

Also, note that if there were no people requiring state assistance in any way, then there'd be a lot of people out of work. Your premise also surmises that everyone is honest and becomes wealthy via legitimate or moral means, a fact which you must surely acknowledge is not the case in many cases.

Those self-made people are very rare and sometimes things go wrong. Just because someone doesn’t have extreme creativity, extreme hard work ethic, and damn good luck doesn’t mean they should be stuck in poverty for the rest of their life.

I don't think that a child of a rich family shouldn't enjoy luxuries, just that the child shouldn't have an advantage in getting a good job than a kid raised in a poor family. They both should have to prove that they are better than the other.

Rkzenrage, I don't know if you are understanding or what. I think the person who works the hardest and proves that they are the best should get the best jobs, not just the best from rich families.

By the way, we have no free will or very limited free will.

I just wrote three pages and it did not post *shoves nail into eye*... perhaps later.

The nail probably wont help. ;) Sorry, there isn't a squint smilie

True, sometimes you stay, some times a ditch digger is a ditch digger due to no fault of his/her own. He/she may not be motivated enough.
When I left I had to go to class dead tired instead of deciding, making the choice, to sit on the couch or go to bed those nights after digging. He/she may not have the natural talents to do well in school, just a fact, no fault of theirs or the schools… they may have to work harder an many get discouraged, but quitting will be their choice. He/she may like their life, OMG!!!!

No, it is not possible for everyone to do everything, but it is possible for everyone to find their place. Again, excluding the truly disabled/mentally handicapped, lack of motivation is neither. You know what makes my point wonderfully, guys and gals that are “special’ often have to FIGHT for the right to work and have their own place (I was a coach for the Special Olympics).
The ones that choose to are always awesome workers and keep their places spotless. Free-will & choice is the difference.
That there would be less state workers sucking-up our taxes if more people did well is not a valid point. That would be a wonderful thing.

I strongly disagree. I have worked and gone to class all over the US and in every office and classroom I can honestly say there has not been, within arm’s length, someone who was from a poor, or poorer, background, working their way up. Many working two jobs, going to school while raising a family! In LA, you get the added degree to the slope they are climbing of their being “Mexican”, most are not but if they look Hispanic they are automatically “Mexican” to 80% of the idiots in the business community. But, do they complain, no? They CHOOSE to suck it up and prefer to fight on equal footing. I have heard that many times. Here in FL, OMG, the neck backgrounds, rife with meth and booze and yet they plug away, working on their dialect every day (I know this because I help). Again, I have never been in a class or office without someone working to improve.
It is not the exception, it is the norm.

How do you take the advantage away from the rich child? I am very curious about this.
Do you propose to make home-schooling, private schools, prep-schools & boarding schools illegal? Frats? Private college? How?
They should not have luxuries? Why not?
As for the job, their diction, grammar, dialect, people they know, places they have been, school’s shirt, frat pin on his lapel, prep tie, mason’s ring & handshake, vocabulary, etc, etc, etc… is going to go away, um… how?
Natural selection… the big lion’s daughter gets the gazelle… how it is supposed to be.

This is a long post and I am not going to give you a history lesson, I am just going to say this. I am right about this.
America was predominantly built by self-made men and women. Many of them freed slaves, under classes like Irish whom were treated like dogs and a great many uneducated individuals, who, through the pure power of free-will, choice and drive changed the world… for us it has been the norm, not the exception.

The way you see it is the way it is from your perspective rkz. Only yours. Oh for sure there are others who think the way you do, but not everyone.

As to America, well I'm applying my argument to Australia. Being a country based on a democratic, two party system, I'd say the same argument applies.

Yes there are opportunities for people to take up and yes I sometimes look at the news and think, "why doesn't that arsehole go get a job instead of complaining about what the government doesn't give him". Over here there are people who live their whole lives on welfare or who get no welfare because they're homeless. The thing is, in Australia, BECAUSE of the social services offered, there's no reason for people to be homeless. That is a fact. And yet people are. Is it easier to have no home? I doubt it. The persecution alone would be enough to make most people stop being homeless. So why do people choose to be homeless? Without writing a thesis, that's something I can't answer.

The thing is, you can't say it's ok to make a personal choice and then condemn someone for making a choice you don't like. You can't condemn someone from a disadvantaged background who doesn't choose to take the same path as you.

As to America being built by self-made men and women. I wonder what the indigenous inhabitants have to say about that?

I think we were talking about different things with this unless I totally missed something from your post. Are you saying that people are all over the US are working to improve their social status? I would agree with this. I don't think people everywhere are going from lower class to multi-millionaires but are jumping from lower lower class to upper lower class. Do you not think that the children of these people deserve to get as good of an education as the people in the upper middle class?

I am against banning private and home schooling. If someone has the money to send their kids to private schools then by all means send them but an inner city public school should be at least close to a suburban public school. Right now the differences are astronomical. As I said before, we can't just throw money into inner city schools and expect it to fix itself; we will have to find all the social problems (you named a good amount), and try to work on fixing those. Many of them we can not solve but our first goal should be to try end the poverty trap.

I am not condemning anyone? How are you reading that into my posts?
Many of the homeless are mentally ill, it is something that is rarely addressed and needs to be.
I was born here and have been discussing it with you.
Apache and Cherokee are a decent size of my make-up, but I don't think that means anything. The local native Americas tend to be FAR richer than everyone else... you like to gamble? You smoke?

I don't see where comparing everyone to millionaires is valid.
Yes, it would be great if everyone could have the same education, and we should work toward that, and I think we are working toward that (at least until Every Child Left Behind) but we will get rid of it soon. Our schools get better every year, the stats you see on television are skewed, just like violence, murder, etc... all those are down and have been going down for years, but the press finds one bad number and does it's best to sell fear because it raises their numbers. If our schools were so bad other nations would not be doing what they can to send their kids here to get an education.
If people want that kind of education for their kids they are going to have to do their best to see to it that their community school gets what it needs by getting involved or moving to a better district. The first thing we did when looking for our home the last time we moved before this one, checked the schools.

Inner city schools.....who is "we". I taught in a poor district. It is not just the school. If your kids are fighting, refusing to do their work and not in class half the time, it is NOT the school nor the teacher's fault, nor is it the school's job to raise the kids.

Society is the vessel in which we deposit our 'natural rights', that is the rights which we are naturally heir to, but which we as individuals have no mechanism to defend. It is a compact, but, as it is virtually impossible for a human to remove themselves entirely from 'society', it is a compact made by our ancestors which we have inherited. If individuals whose rights and liberties are deposited in society are worse off than they would be, were that society not to exist, then 'society' has failed its purpose.

On these terms, Capitalism if tempered can be seen to succeed; Socialism, if tempered can be seen to succeed. Without tempering both produce a situation which allows a number of people to be much, much better off than they would otherwise be, and a number likewise, to be much, much worse off than they would otherwise be.

At the point where societies were being formed, certain inheritances were gained by some and lost to others. There are people who have transcended those gains and losses (through social mobility), but the majority of people in Western society, though they may increase in properity and opportunity from one generation to the next, do not move in relation to the rest of their generation. Look at the major wealthy and politically powerful families in America and also in Europe. Whilst the Europeans are obviously drawn from a 'ruling' class, America's elite is less obvious, but it clearly exists and it gains only a few newcomers in any generation. This is the disinheritance of the majority of citizens, who have deposited their rights into the nation's safekeeping, just as much as have the ruling elite, yet have inherited a distinctly different set of interests and opportunities (real not theoretical). This is why those, who have across generations improved their familys' interests and built an inheritance of power and influence, often at the expense of their workers' best interests, have a duty to the generations who have followed those workers, inheriting from them their lesser stake.

Pierce, just think back to when you were three or four -- and if that doesn't give you a clear picture, think back to when you were under five and had siblings. How did you react -- mentally as well as physically -- when encouraged, or flat told, to share? Was there not a certain -- resistance?

It's not so unexpected that the living organism seeks its own advantage.

The short answer is No.

Longer answers may be found even in fiction writing: LeGuin's The Dispossessed, Zamyatin's We. Cautionary tales all. Over on StrikeTheRoot, a libertarian BBS, there's a quote bandied about whose author at present escapes me though I'll see if Google can net him: "Communism -- interesting idea. Wrong species."

Sure enough, StrikeTheRoot yields the name of Edmund O. Wilson. Other quotes cite either E.O. Wilson or Edward Wilson... Googley moogley lickety split... more careful checking in a little bit...

Sigh... Google's leaving me none the wiser. It doesn't help that there was an Edward O. Wilson, famous in entomology, and with a name similar enough that the two were indeed confused from time to time. To get to the bottom of this minor point means doing more digging, and likely in a different hole.

My son shared/shares naturally, he wanted to from the giddyup. He has always derived great joy from it.

Dana, I don't buy "natural rights", any more than I do "evil". There is not morality bubble out there sending absolutes out to the universe just waiting for us to pick-up on the pure black and white of it all.
These definitions are made by us and each species/culture/era as we go along.
The outrage we feel at young people having sex with older was not felt when "apprenticeships" existed from ancient Greece to Shakespeare's time... it was consensual and expected in those circles.
Morality is in your imagination.
Teaching kids that they will suffer for all eternity if they do not do what the sky man tells them to no matter how impossible due to the duality of the rules of the sky god is not child abuse?
No.
Because it is the norm in our society.
For now.
Some day it may be looked upon very differently.

No Urbane, we have been trained to be greedy by that point. By that age, we are told that we should share while our parents have their car, their house, their money, and their clothes. No one on this Earth has been raised in an environment where possession doesn't exist. Right now, as far as we know, we can not tell if our greedy nature is genetic or socially influenced.

If it is genetic then every far left economic system is doomed to failure.

If it is socially influenced, then a far left eutopia-like society (notice the spelling) might be possible.

Fair enough :P I was just rehashing Paine:)

Dana, can you define which rights you feel we surrender to the government and which rights we retain to steward ourselves? :confused:

Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property... Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them.:)