[ExI] Homelessness (was Re: Social right to have a living)

[spike]

Stefano Vaj wrote:

>...US liberals - who, btw, used to be ferocious Social Darwinists just a
century or two ago...

A subtle aside: we know what is meant by the term "social Darwinist," one
who believes in a hardline don't feed the poor because they just overbreed
sort of person.  I think of this as misuse of Darwin's name for something he
didn't really mean.  If you read Origin of Species carefully, there is a
surprising slant there often overlooked.  He mentions survival of the
fittest as a mechanism for evolution, but spends far more time on mate
selection as a more important mechanism.  So more properly, a social
Darwinist would be one who believes that societies are shaped by how people
select their mates.  Would anyone want to argue with the notion that
societal characteristics are driven primarily by mate selection?

> ... libertarians accept that shareholders in private corporations touch
dividends, possibly very high dividends, even when they do absolutely
nothing...

Shareholders are doing something.  They are keeping their money in the
company in which they are shareholders.

There is a subtle point of view here I want to understand without
criticizing at all.  I sometimes hear comments about how elderly people use
up resources without actually producing anything.  But if the elderly person
owns a ton of money, they do produce something: they invest that money
somewhere or loan it to someone else who invests it somewhere and turns it
into more money.  So in that sense, rich old people produce value for
society, but poor old people do not.

Lesson: be rich by the time you get old.  Otherwise you become a burden to
society.  If you are a rich geezer, you are a blessing to society, providing
jobs to the poor (at the nursing home) and investing in industry, which
provides jobs to the young and vigorous.  So making a ton of money and
keeping it in your working years equals doing right.  Or the equivalent:
don't be poor, it's a sin.

It's going to be fun to hear rebuttals to that last bit.  {8^D

spike