Running with a stick
May 4th, 2009If you are 18 years old or more, and want to run with a stick, by all means, run with a stick. If you fall down and poke your eye out, well, you’re an idiot. Don’t expect me to pay for your stupidity though. In other words, don’t demand the taxpayers to reimburse you.
If you poke someone else’s eye out, then that’s where we have a problem. In that case, yes, you should be punished.
It is NOT the government’s job to be your mother. That is NOT the role of the government, but every year, it seems like more and more the government is absorbing that role. Every year, people are demanding government and taxpayers bail them out for their own stupidity and every year, you hear people trying to justify why those idiots should be bailed out.
This running with a stick analogy applies across the board - drugs, prostitution, pretty much anything that is victimless. If you want to spend your weekends with a pair of hookers and ten lines of coke, well, so be it. I do not believe in telling another adult what to do as long as it doesn’t affect me. Period.
Now if that person develops a coke habit and has to steal to get more coke, then don’t cry if I shoot him when he tries to steal my DVD player.
The same applies to corporate welfare. What I don’t get is the bank bailout. I used to hear liberals all the time complain about corporate welfare. It was their big rallying point at one time - the double standards that conservatives have where they go off on people getting welfare, but when corporations get welfare, they’re strangely silent.
On this point, I agreed with the liberals. I don’t want anyone to get welfare, except people who are too crippled to work. And that includes stupid corporations who are too dumb to run a profitable business. Let them fail. Propping up corporations that aren’t profitable is bad for the country, bad for the economy, bad, bad, bad.
Yet this time around, it’s the liberals who are screaming for corporate welfare. I don’t get it. They go off on conservatives for being inconsistent, then here, they’re as inconsistent as you can possibly get.
So once again, I strongly do not believe the government should be your mother. If you’re over 18 and you want to run with a stick, feel free. If you poke out your own eye, don’t cry to me. If you poke someone else, then we have a problem. Just don’t expect a handout when you get hurt.
I don’t get it either. Rewarding failure makes 0 sense to me. On the micro level this would look even more ridiculous - imagine giving your kids a cash reward every time they fail a class.
Agreed, and good analogy.
i also want to know why it’s ok to bailout all these damn banks and the execs who ran them right into the ground but the auto companies are being held to far stricter standards than the bankers.
That’s something I don’t get either. Not only that, the auto companies are asking for far less of OUR money, and they’re asking for loans whereas the banks are asking for straight up money.
While I do agree with you in principle, examples like prostitution also have mitigating factors and are not always ‘victimless’ crimes. Very, very, very few prostitutes get into the sex industry out of full free-will. Many are abused runaways who were lured, some had a choice between prostitution and paying rent, others are (in reference to another of your examples) impoverished drug addicts forced into prostitution for their next fix.
There is a very small percentage who do it out of pure choice - but those are by far the minority. I do agree, however, that if prostitution was LEGALIZED and REGULATED, then prostitutes would have protections against abuse, rape, and have legal recourse (and even unions, imagine that!). A ‘hands off’ approach isn’t the way to handle prostitution because that puts the women at an even greater risk of harm.
The thing is, as it is now, prostitutes do get beaten and raped and are afraid to report what happened to the police because it’s illegal.
If you look at places where prostitution is legal, prostitutes are much safer.
And yeah, I know that prostitutes aren’t exactly people from stable homes with college degrees and have been well fed their entire lives.
Yeah, I agree with you there. It sounded like you were arguing for full government “hands off” policy - legalize it and then leave them to their own devices. Which wouldn’t solve the issues of intimidation and wouldn’t really change much except prostitutes wouldn’t be arrested. Making something legal and saying someone now has a right to XYZ is meaningless unless access to legal resources is enforced through regulation and oversight.
Not to get off topic, but a good analogy that I am very familiar with is the right for women to vote in Afghanistan. Sure they have the legal right now - but few of them have the power to enact that right because it’s only a right on paper. There’s no enforcement and no advocacy.
Same will be true for prostitutes (I’m not talking about high-paid “escorts” I’m talking about prostitutes). They’d still have to deal with pimps and abuse, and still be trapped because of the fear of retribution if they reported crimes or abuse.
Laura - I agree with you, but whenever you make changes, there will be adjustments.
The whole thing is messed up to begin with. The drug addictions. The pimps. The girls coming from broken homes. The suicides. The runaways.
Honestly, I don’t have the answers for this. I couldn’t run this system.
I just know the girls would be better off if it was legalized and they had legal recourse.
If you can figure out a way to get the pimps out of the business, that’s probably the best chance these girls got.
I think that there would be abuse in any system that is set up, but a free market would give a prostitute the ability to go with a competing agency if she wasn’t treated right, much the same as actors and actresses and athletes switch agents. That’s the beauty of a free market. When an abusive pimp starts to get that reputation, word will spread; and since the success of the business depends on customers, and since the business is legal, there would be websites and such that would sprout up to rate them, reports to the Better Business Bureau, etc, etc. I really don’t see much value making prostitution and most drugs illegal. Of course I understand the urge to do so, but I think it’s best to let people govern themselves. Locally you can’t start a business, a brick and mortar business at least, unless you get approval from the local zoning commission, and that usually is preceded by a community vote.
As for TARP money and corporate welfare, I think it should be Republicans that champion the free market and eschew most types of welfare. I too think families in desperate straits should be able to get help, but even then I hesitate. The perfect system in my mind is completely Darwinian–it’s all the government meddling that rusting the machinery. What most people can’t come to terms with is that there will always be poverty and people who will starve. There’s just too many people and we keep reproducing and the world is swarming to our resources like locusts. You simply can’t take care of everyone. The best you can do is let people solve their own problems. Once they know there is no alternative, it’s in our nature to survive.
Scott - Well said. You know a lot more about this than I do, but I think you’re right. I think a free market will give them their best shot, and it’s so much better than what’s going on today.
Also agreed about welfare. I’m against most forms, except if someone is crippled or a wounded Vet. That’s about it.
If people are perpetually lazy, let them starve (there will always be charities so they won’t really starve in this country. I myself have eaten at churches before). We do have a serious overpopulation problem though, and it’s true that if we made everything equal, it would suck for everyone because of it.