Now you sound like Sam Seder. If you want a safety net, I am not stopping you from using your money to fund it or ask other people to voluntarily fund it.
I am against you (or the government) extorting other people at gunpoint.
Unfamiliar with Sam Seder, so I don't get the comparison. I do understand that he is some sort of liberal media personality, but that is about it.
I fully understand that you are against a government safety net. This is an opinion of yours. Your opinion is counter to Chazal simply because that is your opinion. There is no comparison to not following their medical advice.
http://michaelmakovi.blogspot.be/2011/11/jerusalem-post-what-does-torah-say.html
I by no means consider this twenty year old to be an authoritative opinion. Regarding the points he makes the identity of the author is irrelevant, but many of them are to answer the twisted interpretations that he quotes from Barry Leff. (His link to Leff's article is not working for me right now so I was unable to go by more than his article in itself.) He makes the terrible and shallow mistake of accepting the premise that Chazal say what Leff attributes to them. Even in his refutations of these misconstrued statements he shows a shallow understanding of both Chazal and economics. He begins by broadly applying statements regarding medicine and science to all aspects of the torah. He is uses that to effectively say that once someone disagrees with something CHazal say he may disregard it. You will notice that all examples he brings are from agada which, as he quotes from the Rambam,are often not meant literally. He compares this to clear cut halachic statements of chazal such as ona'ah which is a pasuk in the torah.
Furthermore, it is absurd to say, "A seller cannot charge more than one-sixth (15 percent) more than the market price.", because whatever the seller charges ipso fact *is* the market price! You are essentially telling the seller that he cannot charge more than 1/6 of what he himself charges. It's absurdly recursive
This statement is utterly ridiculous. Imagine a case where a politician is selling a stock which is selling on the the stock market for $50 a share. Someone who is looking for a political favor now offers the politician $10,000 a share for the stock. The politician is now arrested and claims that he sold the stock at market price simply because that is what he sold it at. This is a nonsensical claim. Similarly, a scammer who sells this stock privately at this price to someone who does not understand the stock market just because he was able to convince them that it was worth it cannot claim that he sold it at the market price.
I keep seeing a statistic, that the government spends over $60,000 in welfare annually per poor family.
Not that they receive that much, but that's how much the government spends running all their different ridiculous programs. Why are there still poor people? If they just cut a check for 60 friggin thousand dollars that would put the entire population far above the poverty line.
If you can't agree that the government turned into highway robbers and causes economic inefficiency you are clearly deluded.
Every recent election the big focus is always on "minorities" (aka potential black and Hispanic voters) and how much "freebies" each candidate can promise them.
As is famously said "When the people find that they can vote themselves money that will herald the end of the republic."
I fully agree that the current safety net system is utterly ridiculous and have not made any statement otherwise. On the other hand, that does not mean that not safety net should exist at all.
As Zale mentioned, some level of a mandatory safety net is what is advocated al pi torah. I did not say anything more or less than that. I think that he took it further than I would.
You have really veered from the question. Zale has pointed out that al pi torah there should be a mandatory safety net. It seems to me that Zale and I disagree as to the scope of that net, with him being of the opinion that it would go as far as current food stamps while I feel it would be much more limited.
“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those others that have been tried” – Winston Churchill.
Many, if not all, of the issues with this system would be solved by following Chazal's system. Some of the differences are that chazal's system is purely local and run exclusively by the town by volunteers with local oversight and little to no bureaucracy. Even then, only those with extreme circumstances such as being close to starvation would qualify for assistance. It is somewhat, but not quite Paul Ryanesque.