Don't have time to check all the comments (I need to run and join a WoW dungeon crawling group sortly) but you pretty much summed up why I'm uncomfortable with the idea of the governemnt 'butting out' and letting every man be for themselves. I think people who are all so proud of themselves for their "good choices" don't realize how easy those good choices were for them, or how much other, non-governmental forces (parents, mostly.) prevented them from making bad choices and picked them up when the bad results of their choices came back to haunt them. They don't realize the innate advantages they have just in the fact that their brains and bodies work more or less properly.
Like many of them, I was extremely lucky. My parents were involved in my schooling and my father is still involved in my life, helping, advising, and protecting me. I'm healthy. I had a reasonably stable childhood, and it was possible, when I couldn't handle college because of my ADD and other issues for me to see a specialist and get a couple of very expensive prescriptions to make focusing and remaining emotionally balanced possible. Unlike them, I can see that if I'd been without even ONE of these things, I would not have made all the "good choices" that I made. And what about, for example, people whose houses and livelihoods are destroyed by Katrina or Rita? Could they have "chosen" not to be hit by a hurricane? (Yes, they could have lived elsewhere, and risked tornadoes, or earthquakes, or blizzards, or typhoons, or simple house fires.)
So I'm not inherently better or more deserving of a good outcome than many of these people, and thus the inequality strikes me. And the complete lack of empathy and understanding of someone who cannot see that their good outcomes do not make them special except in the sense that they're especialy lucky boggles my mind.
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Like many of them, I was extremely lucky. My parents were involved in my schooling and my father is still involved in my life, helping, advising, and protecting me. I'm healthy. I had a reasonably stable childhood, and it was possible, when I couldn't handle college because of my ADD and other issues for me to see a specialist and get a couple of very expensive prescriptions to make focusing and remaining emotionally balanced possible. Unlike them, I can see that if I'd been without even ONE of these things, I would not have made all the "good choices" that I made. And what about, for example, people whose houses and livelihoods are destroyed by Katrina or Rita? Could they have "chosen" not to be hit by a hurricane? (Yes, they could have lived elsewhere, and risked tornadoes, or earthquakes, or blizzards, or typhoons, or simple house fires.)
So I'm not inherently better or more deserving of a good outcome than many of these people, and thus the inequality strikes me. And the complete lack of empathy and understanding of someone who cannot see that their good outcomes do not make them special except in the sense that they're especialy lucky boggles my mind.