We need the government to save us from ourselves :(

[Nintendarse]

Weltall: I will concede that it is more difficult for some to achieve than others, but there is always a way, and if you are resourceful enough you can overcome many shortcomings. It depends not on where you were born or raised or what color you are but it your ingenuity and your will to succeed.

I respect your passion for the capitalist system, but there are some inconsistencies in your post. In one hand, it is more difficult for some to achieve than others because of shortcomings. You have to admit that race, wealth of parents, and place of birth are significant shortcomings. On the other hand, you say that success doesn't depend upon the very shortcomings that you have just recognized. The only way that this can be true is if success is defined in a relative manner.

I'm assuming from your previous posts that intelligence is a fair shortcoming. I hope that we can all agree that race is an unfair shortcoming. Yet both of these traits are strictly tied to genes, things that we cannot control. This is an inconsistency. Both must be either fair or unfair. For the sake of humanity, we must conclude that both are unfair. In the context of a capitalist system, this means that some people are given unfair advantages/disadvantages simply because of the manner of their birth: their genes, their parents, their wealth, their neighborhood. Where we go from there is up to us.

Welfare is an attempt to help the people with the most unfair disadvantages so that they can reenter the capitalist system. Because we are human, we are bound to make an imperfect system. Instead of helping people reenter the capitalist system, we provide no incentive to leave Welfare. Instead of providing people with things, we might want to try providing people with training. The military is one way to do this. Another is through something like Israel's Histadrut, a state-run, nation-wide organization that ran the economy by finding jobs and helping people start up businesses. If we molded this idea so that it only applied to those on Welfare, this might be a good alternative to military service.

On the illegal drugs issue, you nearly proved my point by bringing up acohol. What dangerous effects to other people do illegal drugs have that alcohol (which is legal) doesn't?