"The free market always works." Yeah, it sounds simple, but I have not yet found an exception in specific cases. Every lousy thing that has been laid at the feet of the free market always turns out to have some government monkey wrench tossed into it. The catch is that the free market is rarely allowed to work, and when interfered with it generally makes things worse.

...People stay poor because they lack opportunities to learn not only calculus, but table manners. I refer you to "Pygmalion" by G.B. Shaw. And it is so true that the room at the top is limited. Someone has to collect the garbage, and we need more garbage collectors than CEOs. I haven't noticed that CEOs encourage their children to honest work in that direction.

Where I came from, poor people were typically better mannered and usually more generous than a lot of rich people were--including dressing cleanly and knowing which fork to use. As someone once said, just because you're poor doesn't mean you can't clean up your yard. And as Pygmalion also showed us, there is a big difference between formal manners and decency.

We will always need garbage collectors, and the ones that work around here are far from being poverty stricken. And there are probably more than a few CEOs who started out as garbage collectors, or the equivalent. I shoveled silage in a vegetable factory myself.

The government has implanted us all with fear. Fear that without them, we are all doomed. You acknowledge that private organizations might do the job, but fear that they can't, or won't. Yet you seem to have no such fears that government solutions might let you down. Why is this? For all the trillions spent on poverty, is it any better than it was before the War on Poverty began? Black people have rights now that they never had before, but they are arguably far worse off now in many other ways than they were only a few decades after the Civil War.

The government spends trillions of dollars on social programs, often with few results, or even negative results, yet they are never called to account for this, and the faith of people in government solutions remains strong. How is this done?

I talked about successful private charitable efforts, and you replied:

...The problem with this kind of giving is that it is unsustained. We forget and assume it's someone else's job to remember

One problem is that most of us have been trained since birth to assume that everything is eventually the Government's Problem. Many people, faced with any problem at all, turn first to the government in one form or other before they think of anything else. And people who might be motivated to care for others start to think that it's the government's problem, and "hey, what do I pay my taxes for?"

* * *

We could go back and forth like this forever, but it's all moot, really. I must admit that I have no evidence on my side of the argument other than theory, philosophy, and piecemeal historical examples. I can't point to a pure libertarian society somewhere in real life and say, "see? It works." Unfortunately there are far too many examples of the other, totalitarian extremes.

I can point to areas of our lives that are served quite nicely without governments being in charge. Most of our needs in this country are filled successfully this way, and to most people the process is completely invisible to them. So how to show that such a system would work for needs that have been provided by the State all our lives? How do you prove that we would still have highways without a Highway Department?

Once I theorized that there is something in our ancient monkey/baboon genes that cannot abide living without either being a leader or being subordinate to one. An "alpha male" kind of flaw in the human personality. Humanity seems to slip so easily into monarchies, gangs, armies and dictatorships, yet societies of free and independent individuals seem as rare as hen's teeth. It does sometimes seem to be all that we can do to prevent some of our Presidents from becoming emperors, and with the enthusiatic support of the people.

Good talking to you again.