Here's my position: I'm a very liberal democrat. I believe it is in our own best interests to takecare of those who, through no fault of their own, are having a hard time taking care of themselves.

Those who believe we are all brought into this world from an equal starting point aren't thinking carefully. And those people who say, well, I've known plenty of people who grew up with no advantages, and they made a success of themselves - this may be valid for this person they're thinking of, it may be valid for five hundred people, it may be valid for five thousand people, but as a general principle, if you look at the real numbers, it is not valid, it is not a true representation of reality.

The reality is, the poorer the family you're born into, the poorer you are likely to be, the more likely you'll turn to crime, drugs, etc. Of course there are exceptions, obviously, but just because there are exceptions does not mean that we all are given an equal chance in life.

I think we're being short-sighted when we drink $3cups of coffee on a daily basis and drive around in $45,000 SUVs and at the same time ignore the poor around us, those who have no education, no role models, no way to climb out of their situation, and say, well, they should help themselves, they should be strong! Ha ha ha.

Let me also be clear about this, that it is not ONLY for reasons of compassion that we should help the less fortunate - it is also to make the world better for ourselves. When the world is more equitible (and more intelligent in general), it will be cleaner, safer, with less crime, less alchohol-related deaths, higher productivity...

Maybe we should not all be required to have exactly the same level of wealth, but 1) the distribution is too unequal for anybody's good, and 2) Anybody who thinks we all have the same opportunity to acheive hasn't looked at the evidence.

One of the most heated debates these days is between liberals and conservatives, specifically in regard to welfare and other forms of government assistance to the poor. Both sides feel very strongly about this issue.

I don’t want to summarize the arguments too briefly, but I think it’s fair to say that the people on one side of the debate think the people on the other side are greedy and just want to preserve their wealth at the expense of the less-fortunate. The people on the other side believe that simply giving things to poor people does not encourage them to better their own lot, and thus perpetuates their dependance.

Let's identify some of the questions we need to ask in order to get the ansers e are looking for, or if we cannot get the full answers, then at least to move in the direction toward those answers:

• Can poor people help themselves without us supporting them?
• To what extent should we support poor people?
• Is supporting poor people worthwhile to the society?
• To what extent is suppoting poor people worthwhile to the society? What is the cost/benefit of supporting poor people?
• Does helping poor people help them more than if we left them alone? What does it mean to leave them alone? What does it mean to help them?

Just because Europe has high unemployment, can we say that socialist policies failed? Well, to help clarify this, can you say that just because Sears is losing money, that its capitalist ideas are wrong? Or that retailing is wrong? Well, if all socialist governments are not doing well, maybe we have a stronger case.

On the other hand, how do we measure whether a government is doing well? One possible way would be what the people living within those governments think. Well, the people of Europe have shown that they do not want a more "deregulated" economy, that they actually like their style of government. So are the socialist governments doing well? Well, this argument is not totally convincing either, because it is easy to say, well, these people just won’t know how good a deregulated government would be until they are able to see it for themselves.

Another measuring stick is "standard of life" indices compiled by various agencies. However, these are also not foolproof, because the different countries being measured have started from very different places. For example, can we say that America's prosperity today is due to its capitalist system, or to the fact that it was the only major power left standing after WWII? Or, to its huge size and tremendous natural resources (yes, Russia has those too, but a simple America/Russia comparison is also not a fair comparison - what about the hundred years before Russia became socialist? What about the two hundred years before? What about the fact that lots of Russia is freezing cold most of the time, whereas America is not?)

Here are some questions to ask yourself. As you drive home in your $45,000 SUV, as you work out at the gym, as you sip on that $3.75 latte: do you have enough money, do you have enough things, do you have enough material comfort that you can afford to give a litle bit to one of the 40 million Americans who is living below the poverty line? Or to one of the 3 billion people in the world living below the sustinence level?

Another question is why should you give if it’s all going to be wasted by inefficient government bureaucrats.

Another question, and perhaps the most difficult to answer, is: do poor people deserve our help? How can we answer this question? do we know the answer? Many people feel certain that poor people do deserve our help, and that it will be a net gain to the system as a whole to give to them.

Many others feel that giving to poor people is bad: that it fosters dependency, that it perpetuates a vicious cycle.

Also, that these people should do for themselves, rather than accepting handouts.

They believe that there have been many cases they’ve heard of, indeed even some they know of first-hand, of someone being born or raised in bad circumstances, and lifting himself up by his bootstraps, to achieve uccess purely through the application of free-will, or self-determination. And the victory was that much sweeter, it can reasonably be claimed, being snatched from the jaws of likely defeat, starting where it did.

So why do we feel these thins so certainly? Why do they seem self-evident to us? Why does what seem self-evident to one person is thew exact opposite of what another person feels is self-evident.

We all have strong beliefs, some well-founded, some not. A surprisingly wide-range of people I have talked to believe that the poor are responsibe themselves for their plight. One woman I know, a very kind, gentle older lady, remarked to me once, "but black people are kind of lazy, aren’t they?"

Of course, we call this kind of self-assurance racism, because it attacks another human on the basis of race alone. But a question whose answer it would be worthwhile to know is, does this kind of self-assurance bear any resemblance to the kind of self-assurance that leads people to think, in their heart of hearts: well, poor people are kind of lazy, aren’t they? Drug addicts are kind of weak and self-indulgent, aren’t they? People who steal are naturally mean and irresponsible, aren’t they?

So what are we arguing? We need to be clear about what our opinion actually is. Even if it is something relatively mild, for example, poor people should help themselves and not get help from other people. What does this presuppose? It persupposes that poor people are able to help themselves. And to be clear, what does it mean to be able to help oneself? In this situation, it probably means something like work hard and get a job; stay away from drugs; stay away from crime.

What is a logical corrolary of the above? It is that poor people have a choice, either to help themselves or not. Surely this is implied in the statement. Poor people could not help themselfves if they did not have the ability to help themselves.How could one make the statement that poor people should help themselves if they did not have that ability? So a question to examine is whether poor people have the ability to help themselves. Many people fervently believe that poor people are stuck where they are and cannot get out without our help. Others believe, really believe deep in their hearst, that poor people have all the recources necessary to pull themselves out of whatever situation they’re in, through hard work and perseverance, and make it to success (maybe not so successful that they would actually have the ability to compete with the person considering them – that would be going too far - but at least to a level not too much lower.

So how do we decide whether poor people have the ability to help themselves? Starting with basics, if we decide that we will indeed not be racist (because racism is based on emotion rather than acts), then we can conclude that people, wherever they are born, all around the world, havea genetic makeup similar enough that it is not a significant factor in determining whether or not someone has the recources to help himself. And anyway, the poor are certainly not of one distinct racial class – especially if you look at the poor worldwide and not just in the United States. So we have decided that the poor are gentically similar to the rest of us successful people. So why don’t they help themselves? They no longer have the excuse of being genetically inferior? let’s ask this? Where are the majority of poor people born? I mean really poor people, those living below the US poverty line, which is pretty low – believe me, you wouldn;’t want to do it for a month. Where are they born? Well, here we find a statistically signficant figure: the vast majority of those in poverty were born into a family (single-parent mother, foster home) that was already poor. Exceptions exist, of course, but there it is, a startlingly significant figure. This is true in the US, and it is certainly true around the world. Where were the majority of the poor in Caluctta’s slums born? Wwell, they were born into a very poor family.

To rational people like you and me, this kind of correlation calls for further inquiry. This seems to implie that there is some relationship – not 100%, but statistically signficiant - between the economic sitation one is born into, and one’s economic situation later in life. So how does this bear on the question of whether one is able to pull oneself out of poverty? How does it bear on the subquestion of whether one has the recources to pull oneself out of poverty? First we must look deeper at this relationship between economic place of birth and economic sitaution. Does this mean that all the poor people are genetically inferior, and are having genetically inferior babies, and so of course they are all poor, the lot of them? Well, no, we decided a little earlier that genetics did not play a significatn role in this.

So why do they stay there? Why do these poor people, being born with the same faculties as the rest of us normal people, why don’t they look around, as soon as they are old enough to have some wits about them, and say, my gosh, this place is bad, these people I am associating with, my friends, my brothers and sisters, my aunts and uncles and grandparents, my parents, these well-intentioned people are actually the dregs of society. I need to raise myelf up and out of this place.

Being serious here, another question we must consider is: what is the best way to help these people

Being charitable is like voting: one person doesn’t really make much difference, but we do it anyway, we cast our vote for the right candidate, the right cause, because we know that if enough of us do it, then the right candidate, the right cause will win. And we talk to other people, we try to explain our feelings to our friends, and in this way we influence a lot of toher votes. Our own little donation to a charity, our own giving money to that person on the street asking for it, doesn’t do much. But if our friends also doa little bit, and their friends also, and so on, well that makes a big difference. This is the thinking that was behind the ig popularity of the recent slogan: thinkk globally, act locally. Put another way, it means, do what you know is right, even if you think it will only make a small difference. And by the way, any small difference you think your twenty or fifty or a hundred dollars might make, it will make a correspondingly much larger difference to the recipient.