Marc Paolella #fundie

Marc Paolella #fundie city-data.com

There is no gap between the haves and the have-nots. There are no haves and have-nots. This is not an intelligent concept. There is you. And there is what you have. If what you have is not enough for you, it is YOUR PROBLEM and will require YOUR SOLUTION, depending upon your talent, energy, and drive.

Keep it simple. Keep it free. Poverty is a personal problem. Society should do NOTHING for the poor. Being poor is a personal choice. It should be easily remedied by making intelligent personal decisions to make oneself more valuable to other people. By being more valuable, you will have more stuff. By being less valuable, you should have less stuff. It's a simple, rational, and moral equation. Without victims, and without compulsion.

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old comment by

Sounds like you're a fan of George Pullman. The guy who got away with paying his employees fake fucking money that was only redeemable in a single town he owned. Now there was a real man of industry, a firm believer that anyone too lazy to work for sub-minimum wage paid in monopoly money and live their personal lives to his standards after they clocked out of work could starve to death in a damned alley. Want to buy nice things, retire, or have savings worth the paper it's printed on? Tough shit communist, the Boss don't owe you nuthin' and neither does anybody else. Want to move or find a new job? Good luck paying travel expenses or rent in Pullman Scrip.

old comment by SpukiKitty

@Horsefeathers

I looked at the profile. He also has:

"HERITAGE: American"
(Not 'Italian' or whatever 'Paolella' is)

"ETHNICITY: American"
(Not 'White' or 'Caucasian')

So basically, he not only licks Ayn Rand's unholy yoni, he's an ethnicist, too! I'll bet he's a blast to be around...NOT!

Strangely enough, he loves the films Schindler's List (A guy defies his Nazi employers and rescues a bunch of Jews) & Shawshank Redemption (Something about enduring getting out of prison, I don't know the plot exactly).

Either the former flick is an example of Even Evil Has Standards* or this guy has a fun time watching Amon Goeth's psychopathic antics.

However, Ms. Rand was of ethnically Jewish heritage. Mr. Evil Real Estate Guy may be a more orthodox Randroid rather than a "Christian" one.

*http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EvenEvilHasStandards

old comment by UHM

"Being poor is a personal choice."
Only if you're single and rich.

I can proudly say I live in social democracy, a social market economy actually. I come from a comfortable lower middle class environment. Thanks to the state here I received a free education and health care. Thanks to the state I was able to go from the third tier of our education system to the second tier, the third tier and than to a university. I'm especially thankful to have gone to a university, because on my own I could not have afforded that. The state had the audacity to mangle in my freedom and give me a loan from somebody else's taxes, which I'm currently paying back. Without such education I would not even be able to write this, as would not have been able to learn a second language to near perfection (I know full well that I will probably never be perfect, but I will try to get as close as I can), because my parents can't speak English that well, neither can any of my relatives and we never had money for a private tutor I simply would not have gotten anywhere if the state hadn't provided me free stuff.
Nobody is arguing that you have to give up all your things and give it to the poor - or, well, at leat liberals and progressives don't, actual socialists might, but those are neither mainstream nor anywhere near powerful. What liberals and progressives in the US want is for everybody to have a fair shot, to truly let that persons work ethic and character decide. Make no mistake I don't fully attribute my relative success to the state, it also was me; my willingness to work my ass off and go somewhere - at least somewhere that I could chose my profession over my need for money. If my parents would have been just a bit poorer and lived in a libertarian society, I would not have been able to go to school and get that education, instead I would have had to take a job, spend less time with school and more trying to get food on the table. Because sometimes, the jobs that a person can get simply don't offer enough payment or enough free time to get anywhere else.
I just want for the next generation of Americans to have the same chance as I did, what's so bad about that?

@SpukiKitty:
Hold your horses about the ethnicist part, that might be your bias showing there. It's also possible that he doesn't think only white people are Americans, but that he denies the concept of ethnicity as a defining characteristic of a person - given that he's libertarian that's actually quite possible.

old comment by farpadokly

"There is you. And there is what you have". But some people have simply got inherited wealth. They didn't do a damn thing to acquire it. They're already at an advantage.
I honestly don't know why people like this consent to live in societies at all. Why don't they take their individualism to its logical conclusion and go and live in a shack somewhere, only living off what they can grow? Never buy anything that was made in a factory, by groups of people working together, for isn't that "collectivism", and a horrible sin?
It's a complete and utter myth that our system rewards "talent, energy and drive". It might do but only coincidentally. What it also might reward is cunning, exploitation, taking advantage of people's stupidity.
Does he have any idea how much of the world's population is in poverty? How can it possibly be "a personal choice" to starve to death, or watch your children starve?
"Make oneself more valuable to other people". That is a slave rationale. That is the same as reducing oneself to an object, to be sold. You've reified yourself, you've become an object even to yourself. What happened to the old-fashioned idea that people have inherent value, just by being human?
To measure your value by the dictates of the market is not rational or moral, for the simple reason that a lot of wicked and harmful things are potentially profitable.
The idea that there is "no compulsion" in capitalism is also a complete myth. What else is it that compels someone to do something they don't want to do?

old comment by Jen

Try not getting talked to as a young child because you were born to poverty and your parents were too drugged out or something. So you don't have much of a vocabulary. Did you know that kindergartners from educated families have higher vocabularies than adults from poverty? So then you have a lot of trouble learning to read and understanding when you do. So you can't get into college and have a job where you have to have food stamps to support yourself at all. But you should have pulled yourself up by your bootstraps! It's your fault that your mother did drugs while you were in the womb. You should have stopped her. There is only you. Having fetal alcohol syndrome is a personal choice. See the deep thinking and consideration of reality in this perspective.

Marc Paolella #fundie city-data.com

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