Who cares how "deserving" the poor are?
Noah gets cheezed off slightly at the upcoming "Deserve to be poor" debate , asking, "Who cares how "deserving" the poor are? Regarding the first of my questions, "Do we want to make poor people less poor", it may be that your sense of morality tells you that if someone is in a condition as a direct result of their own actions, it would be wrong to try to remove that person from that condition. Fine, good for you! But for my part, I often simply don't care. If I am getting mugged by a poor person, I quite frankly do not give a rodent's gluteal region whether that person is poor because he made bad life choices or because the circumstances of his birth made his poverty inevitable; I want him to stop mugging me , and if making him less poor will make him stop mugging me, then maybe this would be a good thing to do, regardless of whether he "deserves" it. When I witness the urban blight, violence, drug abuse, and other social ill...