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Comment by EgregiousCube | Hacker News Reader

You'll find very few people who don't want poor people to have things and it's disingenuous to put it that way.

The two commonly held arguments against socialized healthcare in America are: First, a distrust that the government will create a system that is good and a belief that quality will decrease under such a system, and;

Second, that such a system would be funded by a large tax increase and that Americans are in general hard to get excited about tax increases. The financial concern is in the taking, not in the getting.

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> You'll find very few people who don't want poor people to have things and it's disingenuous to put it that way.

I'm afraid your experiences are not universal.

There is a very strong streak of this in the US, significantly (though probably not wholly) traceable to the Calvinist roots of the Puritans who were a profound influence on the early culture of the country. When you believe that people's position on Earth is due to their level of deserving (Just World Fallacy), it's very easy to extend that to "and therefore we shouldn't try to help poor people; they're just being punished for being bad people."

There is a wide gap between not wanting to be responsible for helping the poor and actively wanting the poor to fail. You're confusing the two.

You're right about the first part, but I'm not confused about anything.

There are genuinely many people who wholeheartedly believe that the poor deserve to be poor, and that helping them is bad. Some of them aren't even that well off themselves, but have bought into an ideology that's detrimental to them.

If you haven't encountered these people, then count yourself lucky, but don't try to deny their existence or assume your own experiences are universal.

Clearly people of every ilk exist, but my claim is that people like this are irrelevant to the debate around socialized healthcare. Show me an American politician who's run on the platform of openly wanting to hurt the poor because they deserve to be hurt, their electoral victory, and that person's vote against a socialized healthcare initiative. It's not a thing.

Regan's "welfare queen" comes to mind. More recent examples were those against stimulus checks (but very much for PPP "loans"). Any politician who believes in means-testing, when the bureaucracy adds an overhead greater than the amount saved is arguably out to hurt the undeserving.

You can't deny the politics of retribution exists, because politicians only give oblique references to it; voters certainly believe it, hence one voter who complained about Covid shutdowns thusly: "He's not hurting the people he needs to be"

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