Quote Originally Posted by Suppressed Poet View Post
First I’ll say once again that I’m not justifying slavery. I denounce it and recognize the harm it has done. So please stop accusing me of that. What I was trying to point out to you which you refuse to acknowledge is that it’s not as simple or accurate to say the evil white man enslaved a bunch of black people and our country was built upon this principle. Slavery was universally accepted practice on a global scale from the dawn of humanity until the 19th century. To imply that America’s founding is immoral because we had slaves…well if you have that mentality than every single people & society on earth was guilty of that in that time. You are trying to apply our present day rational and norms upon a different time, and it simply doesn’t work that way. That doesn’t make slavery in anyway less wrong and once again I’m not justifying it, but I think you need to look at reality of how the world was at the time & realize the USA was unique ONLY in the sense that we eradicated slavery.
This is mostly untrue. There were numerous other nations that abolished slavery before the USA. Starting in the 1300's. People knew it was wrong, there's no excuse.

Quote Originally Posted by Suppressed Poet View Post
On your question of how do we accomplish better standards of living without wealth redistribution…. Let’s take a look for a moment at cultures that do really well here. Asian Americans make on average a higher income than whites. So do Jews. So do Nigerian immigrants. Just a few rough examples for this simple exercise. You know what they have in common? Their cultures place a high emphasis & value on education, discipline, & personal accountability. They don’t have a victimhood mentality of entitlement. They bust their ass in school & work hard to make themselves valuable contributing members of society. Its not that I lack empathy for poor people. The difference between you & I is that I want to give poor people the opportunities and choice of not to be poor, where it seems you want to give the poor more money (which doesn’t really make them any less poor is the point I was trying to get across).
I'm not going to use the R word here. I'm just going to point out that you didn't suggest any solution. I disagree that any "culture" has a victimhood mentality. Even if they did, what are you going to do to change their culture without spending a lot of tax money on it?

Quote Originally Posted by Suppressed Poet View Post
Robbing Jeff Bezos isn’t going to help you usher in your utopian society. That’s all I’m going to say on that.
I don't want to rob anyone, but I DO think that people like Bezos should pay their fair share of taxes. I also think it's disingenuous of you to keep saying this or that isn't going to create a utopia. The lack of the existence of a perfect society is not an excuse to not try to improve our own. I'm just talking about trying harder to reduce things that shouldn't exist in a first world nation: starvation, homelessness, lack of medical care.

Quote Originally Posted by Suppressed Poet View Post
On what is the purpose of government? Well I say it’s a reflection of our own society’s values. We need government for national defense, to make & enforce laws, & many other things… but government DOES NOT exist to serve you with benefits. And if you let it happen, it will RULE you. Our founding fathers understood this very well.
I think it's more accurate to say that healthcare being tied to employment is what RULES people. There's a reason the term "wage slave" exists.