Any
successful entrepreneur is dependent on continuous daily luck. (E.g. if
you lost the ability to navigate a directory tree due to some nasty
problem in your brain even if you've been exercising and eating healthy,
you would not be useful to a business.) You might be ok because of
your savings, but even that's dependent on previous luck (your brain
happened to function well enough previously in your life).
(As for the 'they just have bad genetics, sucks for them' argument: no one knows what proteins their genes are rifling off at this moment, and everyone's
genetics are bad, in the sense that our cells fail and we all die of
some health problem. The probability of when this happens rises as we
age, but it's always nonzero, every day, for every person.)
A
not-terrible analogy for effort in this life is rafts floating on the
ocean that people are spend years of sweat and effort building their
homes on. All the effort and whatever beautiful structure you see has
depended every day on the sea not being violent enough to toss it down
under the water. (Clearly effort is worth something (it's nice to have a
home), but consideration of how much daily luck undergirds everything
is something people have a hard time tolerating.)
I
think you can argue for libertarian/republican health policy, but I've
never heard anyone do it honestly yet. It becomes naked and much harder
to say out loud, and it goes something like this: "My ability to care
about you is limited." That's really unpalatable to admit out loud and
it even feels nasty to type out. But it's true for all of us. Every
time I eat a burger, I could spend half the amount and donate the other
half to desperate hungry people who could surely use the calories and
nutrition more than me. "I don't care about you" is an impossible
statement to say out loud especially for the religious right, because
good people are supposed to be caring people, and everyone seems to want
to consider themselves good and so there's a frantic search to find a
justifiable reason not to care (e.g. "He must have done drugs, managed
his money badly, made bad choices, should have not been weak, etc.")
None of these things have to be true. (How many times have you heard
anyone say, "She made great choices, was tough, did all the things she
was supposed to, but you know what, even though she's perfectly
deserving, I'm not going to help her out.")
A reason not to let markets do what they want:
Markets
are superb at making participants without power compete against each
other. The more people that exist, the less bargaining power they have.
(High supply.) Greater desperation will also reduce their bargaining
power. So what is the correct price for the market to pay them? As low
as possible as their bargaining power will allow? As close to zero as
possible? (The common argument here of, "But I didn't create this cruel
universe that lets people suffer and starve" is a shitty argument,
because while you didn't create the harsh conditions, you are taking
advantage of the conditions, and it's actually a really shitty thing to
use a person's desperation against them (though this isn't necessarily
covered in class). If someone had fallen into a deep pit in the woods
and were close to death but someone else came along and rescued that
person from the pit but then forced that person to work in a brothel, no
one would call the finder virtuous, even if the found person prefers
the brothel to dying in a pit. The same argument applies to desperate
workers all over the world. (Anything is better than fucking starving to
death.)
There
is no reason why there should not be inequality (If I create a vase,
why should I have to make a vase for all my neighbors too?) and it would
be really stupid to insist that inequality should go away. But people
have to be dealt in to a certain degree. (If I hire someone to help me
make vases, there is a standard that I need to treat him to. If there
are tons of workers available and they're very hungry and I could get
away with giving one a little bit of food, the market should not get
final say.) So if a market shouldn't be allowed to decide the final
price when the market we're talking about is human beings, what is the
mathematically correct price to pay someone? $10 per hour? $5 per hour?
$1 per hour? The answer is that there is no correct dictionary answer
for this, it's an arbitrary amount, but lots of people have concluded
that the answer is 'as low as you can' instead, which is not a good
answer (unless you believe that whoever has strength and power should be
allowed to get their desires according to how much power they are able
to wield).
I
find that I can explain much more about the way people behave now and in
history (and even the way nature acts) by seeing the world through a
lens of whoever has power gets their desires rather than a 'good/strong
people vs. bad/weak people' morality. Like I said, being 'strong'
always, always depends on luck at its base. Not to say that people
can't play a difficult hand well, but there are hands that you are guaranteed
to be fucked with, sometimes in the harshest way. I think everyone
agrees that luck is kind of shit. (No one respects a lottery winner as
much as someone who created a company that makes something.) Bad deals
of the deck can be insulated against at some cost if we wish to do so.
We could, if we decided to, just commit to saying everyone that shows up
on this planet will not have to worry about starvation. You will not
be eating foie gras, but you will have enough rice and beans and
vitamins in your food to avoid malnourishment. And new farming
technology and markets would open up to service this choice. We don't
have to do this, but it's not immoral to choose to do so. It's just
deciding what the power arrangement is going to be. The arrangement
that humans should organize into hierarchies, with the people up top
corralling many more desperate people below was just convention and the
power arrangement when we showed up here. It's created many many
beautiful and useful things, and it's done many many disgusting things
to people as well.
