It’s not just this, it’s a fundamental inability to *identify* with other people and realize that *that could be me*.
Today I am 31 and healthy and always exercise regularly and eat well so why should I pay for other people’s expensive preexisting conditions and disabilities? Because obviously it’s not possible that when I’m 34 I might get diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or a chronic leukemia and need expensive meds forever. Or that when I’m 36 I might have a child with cerebral palsy who is able to live a full, rich, happy and ~productive~ life but will need expensive healthcare and ongoing assistance to do so. Or that when I’m 48 I might get hit by a car and be left unable to work full time, in need of assistance, etc, myself. Or that when I’m 53 I might get some random-bad-luck cancer (let’s make it easy: not even talk about how lung cancer does in fact happen to nonsmokers or how in any case it’s disgusting to call it “fair” when it happens to a smoker because that punishment doesn’t fit the crime you sadists; instead, let’s consider one of the myriad cancers that hits at genuine fucking random or by some familial genetic vulnerability the individual can’t affect) for which a curative treatment actually exists but it costs $260,000 and without it the prognosis is eighteen months.
Same applies to poverty. (And for some of the same reasons as already sketched, as well as economic cycles and industrial shifts and automation and so on.)
It’s this pervasive prosperity-gospel belief that bad things by definition only happen to the undeserving and trying to help people who experience misfortune is hubris and interfering with the will of the great gods Natural Selection and The Market and doomed to create more problems than it solves because fate favors the lucky because the lucky are deserving because Gnon because *blithering evil*.
I don’t know how to explain thermodynamics and free lunch stuff to people who don’t already have some acquired grounding in physical reality. I also keep saying that caring about other people isn’t the problem (Richard Spencer would probably say he “cares about people”). It’s caring about systems, some of which take care of people (and in a catastrophic failure would become unable to take care of people at all) that’s the problem. If you’re too nihilistically individualized, you’ll apparenrly fail to notice how systems fit together (and don’t). Screaming about it doesn’t seem to help, because systems still fail even when you scream at them. I don’t have an easy answer, but if the most widespread centrist position means ignoring Rotherham-type stuff, then fuck that too.
The economy is like the tyranny of a rocket equation. You only have so much fuel, the gravity between the worlds is already there and you can’t change it.
It is physically impossible to meet all the goals - there just aren’t enough resources (natural resources * capital * labor * technology) to accomplish them all.
American GDP-per-capita is above $50,000. Foreign GDPs outside of a few hyper-efficient places like Hong Kong or Singapore are lower.
If one person takes $3,000,000 to keep alive, you have effectively consumed the complete economic output of one person’s whole entire life.
But it’s worse than that, because our worker had to pay for housing, for food, for transport, for education, and taxes to support all the secondary systems required, and also raise a child to perpetuate the system. If all that’s leftover after all that is $10,000 per year, then any $3,000,000 case consumes the total lifetime surplus resources of five workers.
And I look at many of these cases and do think “fuck, that could be me” - which is part of why I suggested a wage subsidy program!
But a lot of Leftist or Liberal language wants to allow people to create unlimited burdens on society. They want us to pay for treatment while not allowing us to prohibit people from doing things that would require more treatment, or creating people that require more treatment.
You can’t have both! You can’t have both!
The fewer the number of people that require expensive treatment, the more resources you can spend on them. The more that need expensive treatment, relative to the size of the productive economy, the less you can spend on each one, until it falls below the level required for them to survive.
If is vitally important that society become more efficient and more technologically advanced. We must produce more, and more efficiently.
And we can’t just throw aside social technologies. If broken homes fuck people up, statistically, and cause them not to do well in the labor force, then the cost of that comes out of liver transplants, not just ferraris.