Okay, before I begin my turn, let me just say I'm enjoying this conversation with you RickWhite. You have some insights and perspectives I don't have, and others that I have always respected in fellow self-made business owners. I think we only disagree on a few points, but we probably share more core values then those few points.
OK, if I am understanding you correctly you perceive people much like plants in that we all have an equal desire to grow and flourish and that all of us will do so provided our basic needs are met and we all have a place in the sun. I'm telling you this is incorrect.
Not necessarily, I'm motivated by self-interest as well because I believe in what I preach. Forgive me if I sound communist, but I think of "redistribution" as a kind of social reinvestment. Anything more is gross waste and corruption, and actually runs contrary to my goals.
You're right, not everyone will be motivated towards success, but by and large the vast majority of people want to have meaningful work. Very few people are both selfish and lazy, we often call them criminals or con artists. Most human beings are just selfish, interested in their own advancement, and are perfectly willing to work with others for the sake of their own advancement if only they knew how.
Capitalism is essentially a reward based system, the best one we've come up with so far, except it's one major flaw is that without knowledge of the system a person will not only fail to achieve the rewards of using the system but can easily become a casualty of that system. Many of the social services I support already come with (and could definitely do with a great deal more) rewards/punishments based incentives. A hand out helps no one, a hand up helps us all.
What you need to understand is that poverty is more often than not like a disease. And it is like a disease that is unfortunately spread between people - especially from parent to child.
I agree, a disease that grows every generation.
I know teachers who have tried to teach inner city youth and after decades have given up. They say that they simply can not compete with the destructive forces of the parents and the streets.
I know, it's a big problem that will not go away in one generation. My girlfriend works at an elementary school. Many times she tells me about conversations she wishes she could have with the kids but can't because she has to answer to the parents and the school system, which is far from perfect.
But public education has proven to be the most cost effective way to educate as many kids as possible, and the return on our investment has increased every generation we've used it. The alternative? Before public education, most children never learned to read. You talk about a disease that grows, one generation of a mostly illiterate work force would be lethal to this economy.
Forget basic needs such as food and shelter - all Americans have that and it requires tremendously little. In fact, the most poor today have higher standards of living than the average family 50 years ago. So, get the silly notion that people don't have their basic needs met out of your head. I can buy adequate shelter for 10 people for $5,000 in Detroit. Go on Trulia is you doubt me. Hell, people live in mud huts all over the world and get by.
Sorry, but according to all the statistics I've ever come across you're actually dead wrong. The number of people living below the poverty line has increased. The only people who've experienced an increased quality of life are those who need no assistance, and their proportion of the population has decreased in recent decades.
Not all Americans have access to food and shelter. That is a myth. Fact is, the existing government social services are not able to provide enough support to meet the demand. That's why people like me ask for more support then is already provided.
Furthermore, according to the statistics significantly less of that money goes to waste compared to the myriad of non-profit companies who serve the same function.
But even providing one's own basic needs is a huge builder of character. Nobody knows more about self reliance and about the value of hard work than one who must chop his own wood to heat his home and who must till his own soil to grow food.
It is this underlying strength of character and knowledge of healthy living and self sufficiency that teaches one the basics of wealth building. When you teach people how to be self sufficient, you are teaching them how to build wealth. When you subsidize their existence, you teach them the opposite.
Without knowing these core concepts, there is little chance of success. The challenge is to find a way to teach the poor these core concepts. Most of them don't want to hear it for a number of reasons. One of these reasons is that they have bought into the victim mentality dreamed up by the Left and expressed by you above.
And environment is a huge problem as well. How can one be expected to grow up with a strong work ethic and a positive attitude when they have nobody to learn it from? Certainly, teaching these things is beyond the ability and role of the public school system. No, this is something that must be learned at home and in life.
Now in most cases, teaching self reliance is not a reality. And while there may be ways of teaching these core values, they would involve sweeping changes that would largely be at odds with people's civil liberties. So what is the answer? Well, the real answer is that there may not be one. We have already gone so far down the wrong road with regard to the poor that there is little to no hope of every showing them the right path - they are caught in a very vicious cycle of poverty in which they are their own worst enemy.
So, who's problem is it? Is it fair to confiscate money from productive people and toss it into the futile black hole that is our current welfare system - a system that only perpetuates more poverty? I say no.
My solution, would be to let people fail and to cleanse their soul. I would get the people together on a huge farm, tell them their money is cut off and show them how to start from the beginning. I would show them how to build a log cabin and how to live off of the land. They would learn the value of hard work and self reliance and they would learn the value and importance of family and how to work with others toward a common goal.
You see, my way they would learn the core concepts of productive living. Wealth, is nothing more than building on these core concepts. You are familiar with the old saying "give a man a fish you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime." You believe in giving a man a fish, and it is a fish you would steal from another. I believe in teaching a man to fish, and I don't mean by giving a state of the art fishing vessel to a guy who has never cast a line.
All of this is great, I couldn't agree more, the core principles you just described are exactly what I'd love to see in the hearts of every person struggling to escape subsistence living. You plan to feed them, shelter them, and provide them with an education so they're equipped to take care of themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if you stock up on antibiotics (they're so cheap) so you can treat minor sicknesses so they can continue to learn and grow every day they're under your tutelage!
But again, it comes down to access. Access to information, access to these principles, access to leaders who are willing to depose their wisdom into the minds of those who need it.
Le me ask you this, do you volunteer 10% of your time teaching people in exactly the manner you described? Because that's probably about what is coming out of your taxes to pay for existing social services that attempt to do what you just described. They may fall short, they may not be able to provide as effective a teaching method as you or a lot of other self-made business owners but where they excel is in scale.
You or I or all the other self-made business owners couldn't possibly teach every child and poverty stricken person in America, our time is very valuable and could very well be better spent driving the economy; an economy that feeds us (business owners) just as much as we feed it.
But for 10% of your income (about what you're taxed now to pay for existing social services), and 10% of the income of every participant of this economy, this large and complex economic engine turns over one generation at a time. With 10% of your fish we can attempt to expand the economy of this nation by teaching as many people to fish as we can using a large and sometimes wasteful system, or you can make absolutely no fish and attempt to teach them yourself... or not... we could do neither.
But like it or not, our current economic engine has been fueled by social reinvestment for generations already. You never did directly answer my question about whether or not you attended public school.
The question is: from this point forward do we invest more in our own people? Do we invest the same? Or do we invest less?
