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Originally Posted by Ezekiel
1) Yes, some people do make bad choices. But just like anyone else they deserve a chance at correcting that. Following your logic a criminal makes a bad choice so we should lock him/her up and throw away the key? Is it not possible to teach them to make better choices? And in the process not let them starve to death. Not sure where you're going or if you have a suggestion.
So then I guess we should just throw them in the trash if they can't be as you would like them to be?
2) Apparently you have not traveled the country. Try the Ozarks. Try parts of West Virginia. Try parts of New York State. There are many starving people. Many more than you can imagine. In June 2016 there were 60,042 homeless people in NYC, 14,981 homeless families with 23,213 homeless children. Many of them starve.
The purpose of government is to support its citizens - not ostracize them. So while you can't shield people from all possible mistakes that they may make, you can't discard them either.
Yes, but all too many people in the USA do think that you can discard them --- which means that despite all the ranting of the pseudo-religion of "Americanism", there is no sense of unity in America, no sense that "we're all in this together." And this blindness to our social unity has been here right from the beginning.

From Mrs. Frances Trollope's 1832 classic, Domestic Manners of the Americans :

Long, disabling and expensive fits of sickness are incontestibly more frequent in every part of America than in England, and the sufferers have no aid to look to, but what they have saved, or what they may be enabled to sell. I have never seen misery exceed what I have witnessed in an American cottage where disease has entered....
"I suppose there is less alms-giving in America than in any other Christian country on the face of the globe. It is not in the temper of the people either to give or to receive.
"I extract the following pompous passage from a Washington paper of Feb. 1829 (a season of uncommon severity and distress), which, I think justifies my observation.
"'Among the liberal evidences of sympathy for the suffering poor of this city, two have come to our knowledge which deserve to be especially noticed: The one a donation by the President of the United States, to the committee of the ward in which he resides, of fifty dollars; the other a donation by a few of the officers of the War Department to the Howard and Dorcas societies, of seventy-two dollars.' When such mention is made of a gift of about nine pounds sterling from the sovereign magistrate of the United States, and of thirteen pounds sterling as a contribution from one of the state departments, the inference is pretty obvious, that the sufferings of the destitute in America are not liberally relieved by individual charity."
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Once, weapons were manufactured to fight wars; today, wars are manufactured to sell weapons

It is far easier to deceive folks than to convince them they are deceived