Government Wealth Redistribution

"Oh, I don't know, it's kind of the basis of a our government." Look at the preamble of the Constitution, for example: "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."" You cannot take a document like that so far out of context as to justify something like welfare. If that were the intended meaning I assume that it would not have taken over one hundred years for the first forms of welfare legislation to pass. That takes a change in opinion of the populace as to the proper role of government and has nothing to do with its original foundation. ""Promote the general welfare"? As far as I know, that means that the Constitution was written to do things for the good of everyone, unless you've got another definition for general welfare. Obviously, the poor are part of ‘everyone' so..." you have a weak argument. The rich are part of everyone too should I use that as a justification for corporate welfare? "So you know we made it a point to put it there." Read Federalist 30 and 34 (Hamilton) , and 41 (Madison) "I want helping the poor to be an obligation." Which ultimately destroys the charity involved which was my point. You cannot on a moral ground demand wealth to "help" the poor. "It's not like taxes are going to economically hurt the average middle class citizen, the money the poor get from them could mean the difference between eating this week or starving." To state that confiscating wealth will not financially harm someone is tantamount to stabbing someone for their own health. It is that ridiculous. Finally, lets define who counts as poor in this country. The poor as defined by the US Census Bureau are: 1)"Forty-three percent of all poor households actuï¿½ally own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage, and a porch or patio." 2)"Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning." 3)"Only 6 percent of poor households are overï¿½crowded. More than two-thirds have more than two rooms per person." 4)"The average poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens, and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)" 5)"Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars." 6)"The typical American defined as "poor" by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigeraï¿½tor, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microï¿½wave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had suffiï¿½cient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images of dire poverty conveyed by the press, liberal activists, and politicians." (http://www.heritage.org...) "How do you like those numbers?" You should always state where you get your statistics. "It's just our responsibility to take care of the poor. Sometimes we have to be made to take care of our responsibilities." Like I said this kind of logic cannot be used as a moral justification. Why is it our responsibility? Why must we be made to take care of our responsibilities? After all, it is my responsibility to take care of my body, but I doubt you would then demand that we legislate against the use of drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, outdoor activities etc. It is my responsibility to try at everything I wish to succeed in, but pray tell how you can legislate that. Which responsibilities are to be legislated? Furthermore, the only time I have a responsibility is when someone else has a right. You have a right to not be deprived of your life by others so I have a responsibility not to kill you. You do not have a right to wealth that you did not earn so I do not have a responsibility for your financial well being. "And I hope you're not going to say that we should do away with public schooling." Public schooling is a merit good. "Unless it's something so crippling that there's no chance of recovery, there are plenty of people to tax, and if not them, tax corporations." Do you think that corporations exist in some fantasy economy where there economic health is somehow distinct from that of the average individual? How then do corporations fail? Let me qualify that, I am talking about corporations that are not receiving funds from the government. I am not a hypocrite and do not support private welfare and therefore do not support corporate welfare. "You could lower taxes on individuals, making the libertarians happy, and raise them on corporations. You can then use the money for government services, like helping the poor. Everybody wins. You'd think you'd focus your energy on something worthwhile, like that." Oh my god, please think through what you just wrote. A corporation subject to a hypothetical higher tax rate will either raise the price of its products or lower the wages it pays its employees to compensate for this increased cost. History shows it is almost always the former as wages tend to be sticky. When you tax a corporation you merely increase its cost of doing business and therefore increase the price of the product it produces. You and I pay most corporate taxes! How else would you expect it to work? "Until people of my ideological bent gained power, we had robber-barons bribing congress (Central Pacific Railroad, much?) and a corrupt upper-class taking advantage of the poor. We had children working twelve hour workdays in dangerous situations." Champions of those without a voice, you deserve a medal. For the record, it is disgusting when Congress can be purchased by monied interests and is one of my rationales for opposing government intervention in the economy. Do you think that once you began regulating the railroads things changed? No, for the record the railroads bought every Congressman on the Interstate Commerce Commission and are largely responsible for hampering the development of cheaper transportation methods, i.e. trucking (Alan Greenspan, Antitrust). With regards to child labor:"claims of increased misery...[are] based on ignorance of how squalid life actually had been earlier. Before children began earning money working in factories, they had been sent to live in parish poorhouses, apprenticed as unpaid household servants, rented out for backbreaking agricultural labor, or became beggars, vagrants, thieves, and prostitutes . The precapitalist "good old days" simply never existed".(Hessen, Robert, Capitalism, Concise Encyclopedia of Economics) In fact, child labor was already on the way out when these laws were passed as shown by Clark Nardinelli in Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution. I am not suggesting the laws are bad, but in a capitalist society they are usually unnecessary. Besides, the labor markets now demand a certain level of education and provide far greater incentive than the government ever could for education. "How exactly was this working well, again?" Quite well. I would just close by saying that it is not your intentions, which I assume are only the best, that determine outcomes and it is the outcomes we are concerned with.