...would you LIKE some?
*bing!*

I keep seeing that attitude but I don't think it's always sociopathy or sadism.

I think to some extent it's people who believe that a worker's value is always illustrated through what they're doing that day- so that if they have been fired and cannot find another job, that makes them worth less reward, worth less food etc.

This is very simple thinking and always popular, but there's a major oversight here- the idea of latent value or types of work that don't map directly to immediate reward.

If somebody does a thing that runs in boom/bust cycles, their value is high when their work is in demand, perhaps very high- but when the season's off, that person's work value drops off, and if you don't keep 'em alive and well, they won't be able to participate in the next boom cycle for that occupation, which will cause the value of the surviving workers to go through the roof and perhaps make the whole thing impossible. If you want that occupation to exist, you have to account for humans' requirements to continuously exist and be wellfed and healthy.

If somebody does a thing which is societally useful work if you know A, B, C, D, E, F and G, but rapidly loses usefulness when you don't know all that stuff, you have to keep people alive and well as they're learning each thing- if you can do that while they 'unproductively' work with diminished usefulness, you can get to the point where they know A through G and can do the societally useful job and pay their own way- or indeed, help support others who're still in the process.

Babies are lousy ditchdiggers. Most forms of economic activity don't map perfectly to 'do a little of this for a little reward, and the more you do, the more reward'. Unless you want economic actors to be cared for like babies by private individuals (for instance with an inheritance), you look to society to set the rules by which 'babies' grow- and this is where the talk of rights comes from.

Ah, but you PERSONALLY are not required to feed the starving or heal anybody. You are an individual that lives in a society, so the extent of your exposure to this stuff is a relatively small amount of taxation, probably less than paying the salaries of the actual government employees like senators and Presidents and their staff and houses etc.

The idea is that healthcare (or for that matter food) is a SOCIETAL right, and while you personally are free to not feed waifs, the government will make a point of doing so.

The most effective and wide-reaching argument for societal rights of this nature is not the moral argument, because if you were swayed by moral arguments you would be more ambiguous in your refusing to feed waifs (some store-owners or restaraunt-owners might do so, or sometimes do so).

It's a pragmatic argument where you decide that as a society, you will set certain minimum standards for your people and will step in to prevent them dropping below that standard. It doesn't have to be a very high standard, and people will inherently try to abuse it where possible, but in providing 'socialist' health, food, perhaps shelter, you are removing some risk from your citizens' activities and maintaining a larger pool of reasonably healthy, non-starving workers.

I've just read 'Down And Out In Paris And London'. Orwell was right: below a certain point of subsistence, you are a crappy worker and not much use. I've lived that way. You can dare more when you're reasonably well cared for. If you're an entrepreneur or small businessman, being able to dare more is good- more things will happen (in a capitalist sort of way) if people don't have an economic gun to their heads that will destroy them if they step wrong.

It's all about maintaining a healthy society, and you cannot do that by picking the 10% best people and killing or hobbling everybody else. The 10% best do literally need to carry the rest (to some extent) or the whole 'organism' dies.

My feet might be all pissed off at having to take 197 pounds of adult bipedal male human with every footstep- they might consider that totally unreasonable, and demand that my fingers and ears should take on an equal share of the duties of walking around. But my fingers and ears do other things besides walking- and frankly, they cannot do it with any success.

The rich people of America might be all pissed off at having to pay the lion's share of having a working first world society. As a result, we no longer HAVE a working first world society, quite, and it's going to continue to slip until they can cope with their role in the 'organism' and quit trying to amputate limbs and send work off to starving and disposable fingers in the Third World they don't have to take responsibility for.

More relevantly, being self-satisfied maps very poorly to ability to produce in a society. Even customer-service type tasks are sometimes done better by insecure people trying to find validation by over-achieving, and as for creative works and the invention of new things, forget it. So Darwinating the suicidal or would-be suicidal is actually a false economy.

Wow! I remember 1998, too :D

You are missing the 3rd and most important aspect of a functioning free market, symmetrical information.

Even rational and educated people can't make the right decisions with out all the relevant information.

I discovered slashdot ON usenet, at the 'scary devil monastery'. There are still groups I want to return to, and I wonder if they're even still around. I do a webcomic now which also runs a serialized novel updating daily. I want to bump elbows with my writer friends on Usenet again, now that I'm committed to doing what they do, daily. Usenet absolutely still matters, for any group of people who find community through talking to each other. Go reread Russ Albery's Rant again.