Ah. I didn't see that as the point you were trying to make.Steve3007 wrote: ↑July 18th, 2019, 5:17 pm
I didn't make the statement "people starve to death in western societies", did I? I asked you why they don't (and hence implicitly stated that they don't). Obviously the main reason why they don't is that governments infringe on the liberties of taxpayers in order to ensure that they don't, in the form of welfare payments. But it's interesting that, despite this, you appear here to think that this was what I was trying to tell you and that, somewhere in what I said, you also seem to think you detected me equating "food insecurity" with starvation.
But your hypothesis --- that government programs prevent people from starving to death --- is false. Those programs enable parasitism, which is another alternative to working or starving, but they don't prevent anyone from starving. They merely deter them from taking crappy jobs. They would not starve in any case; virtually no one in the US starved before they were enacted beginning in the 1960s. Even during the Depression few people starved. "President Herbert Hoover declared, "Nobody is actually starving. The hoboes are better fed than they have ever been." But in New York City in 1931, there were 20 known cases of starvation; in 1934, there were 110 deaths caused by hunger."
110 cases among 8 million people.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_t ... &psid=3434
And others are ineligible for those programs or ignore them, relying on the solutions I mentioned. They don't starve either.