Others, huh? Well then let’s take this apart. You say this and then double down with this. What you have done there is “welfare queen” the argument, so if you’re wondering why your juggler just got his ass kicked, well, that’s why. Let me give you an example.
Some people on Qt3 are liars, and others phrase their arguments deceptively in order to conceal irrational or shameful beliefs, and they tend to show their ass the most in P&R. If I go from there to the presumption that I should shape my behavior towards P&R posters with that in mind as a general rule, then I would by any reasonable measure be over-weighting the significance of bad actors, and my own counter strategy might well end up being worse than the problem it is designed to address.
That’s what some conservatives with a lot of political capital did when they defined welfare around cheaters and people who don’t want to work, and it’s what liberals allowed to happen because they are shit at seizing the field in an argument. It’s what conservatives did with prisons, when they shaped the overall plan around the absolute worst examples of human behavior, even though there’s no evidence it’s a good plan even for that subset. Again, liberals caved for a variety of reasons, and there’s plenty of shame in that.
In turn, that is what you did by taking a slice of the poor that you have no evidence is normative despite it leading to some pretty radical conclusions about human nature and government policy, and then centering the argument around that. Even now that you’ve significantly moderated your position to just “that group” of mentally ill, addicted, and people who want to be poor, you’ve still got some big problems with the way you are framing the argument. For one thing, each of those three is clearly a different problem that likely requires significantly different tactics; for another, when you are designing the overarching strategy, you need to figure out a classification method and then sort the population accordingly.
You might find that this is a difficult task, in which case the humane option is to give people the benefit of the doubt and design the system as if they weren’t Wanderlust McFuckinFreebird at heart, because I think you’ll find that rehabilitation/treatment oriented answers for the addict/mentally ill populations are not controversial in utilitarian terms.
In fact, if you look at countries with a strong safety net, what you tend to find is that it’s more a question of defining which of these humane objectives have a stronger cost/benefit than whether you should treat people like aspiring box-dwellers, which is a non-issue if it can’t be used to tap into a weirdo political vein. Which you can do in the US, of course, and which people do all of the time in Europe using the immigrant as a catalyst.
