So which do you prefer in the world? Take a vote in the poll and/or reply to this thread with your opinion! God bless Exactly. But I would personally have a problem with the idea that those who do not have particular skills should get a low standard of living. I think everybody should have a possibility to make a good living and grow. Which I don’t think is true for everybody right now. Society has a tendency to rubbish people who have made mistakes instead of helping them to change and develop. If we had a truly fair society that respected the common good there would not be any such thing as generational poverty or poor working people.
Why monarchy. Can you give me a logical reason?
It is often the Catholic opinion to take the “both/and” option, this choice before us is no different.
There is a lot to go through if you’re interested, but here is an excerpt from an excellent article (a must read) on CatholicCulture.org:
"Even a monarch of mediocre talents and natural gifts has the advantage of having received an education for his profession; a democratic leader, in most cases, is nothing but a dilettante… "
Merit-based with common sense SAFETY NETS…that don’t bankrupt the system.Good day to you all!
When a society stoops to rescue it’s weakest from destruction…it is a noble society.
I am sorry I don’t understand that. That just sounds like survival of the fittest mentality.
Wrong. Taking care of the common good is a legitimate government activity precisely because the market place alone cannot ensure everybody’s right to property and living expenses.
A right is something that can’t (or shouldn’t) be taken from you by another human being. Not something you are automatically entitled to by virtue of being human. Human beings have no rights in the second sense, save for the right to free will (liberty). So the right to property, understood properly, means that no one has the right to take your property without your consent. And that actually means that if we respect the right to property, it would be moraly wrong, stealing, in fact, to tax the hardworking, lucky, or greedy in order to give to the lazy, unlucky, or principled.
It is entitled to you, precisely because you are a human being. Only in a nihilistic society, where only the skills of individual matters, is it possible to discard those who are of no use to you.
That’s a fallacy. Nobody has an absolute unconditional right to private property. If my having property undermines your ability to gain property, then that is theft.
In order to provide basis for the claim that rights ought to be respected by the government, without throwing out the separation of church and state, one has to provide a secular source of rights. Usually, the basis for secular rights is nature. But in nature, there is no gaurantee that you will have enough to eat, that adequate health care will be provided, that a decent living will be had, or that people will recieve a proper education. There is not even a right to life. There is no natural or secular basis for these rights, and thus it is not the governments buisness, given the separation of church and state.
I agree. That’s why it is important for us as individual christians to care for those people.
Only if you are deliberately using your property to keep me from gaining it. Merely having property in no way undermines another person’s ability to gain property; it all has to do with the way you use it. people have the right to as much private property as they can rightfully and justly attain. And taking that property without their consent is also theft.
Remember that when you tax, then a third party is involved, which is the state. One has to ask, how much should this third party get to keep? Take for instance the public school establishment, which Bill Bennet dubbed the “Blob,” because it has the ability to digest money poured into it and deliver mostly offal to its clients, the students.
The Bible asks us repeatedly to care for the “anawim”…a Hebrew word for “the poor, the widow, the orphan and the stranger in your land”.