Do people 'deserve' universal health care?

[gagged_Louise]

The problem with socialism, as I see it, is that you wind up with an underpriveleged class who feel that they deserve everything they can get without working for it. They become true parasites, sucking from the government teat, which is kept full by the hard work of the middle class. The wealthy, in any society, will always reap disproportionate rewards, but they generally provide at least some jobs. The welfare class provides nothing but more mouths to feed and strident calls for free everything.

You're free to view people who don't own their house and almost never have the money to go abroad as white trash who show they've never had the guts to make it into the middle class, but quite often, where people are landing in terms of work, and how fast they'll take off, is limited by restraints they don't control themselves and cannot "vote with their feet" to avoid. Lousy schools, outdated models of work, lack of a billfold of useful connections or "getaway money" isn't stuff that people choose to live with, they may not ven be aware of it.

The idea that people who are rich always deserve it would be reasonable if folks like Bill Gates or Nelson Rockefeller had dug their riches out of the barren rock, just by using their own ingenuity and hard work. Of course they didn't: Bill Gates or Larry Page (Google) may be businessmen of genius but they would never have got very far if they had had to work in a "free" economy without powerful public programs for engineering and computer facilities, libraries and education (how would Bill Gates or Steve Jobs have assembled a team or formulated their ideas if they'd had to literally go door-knocking and putting in small ads for money gathered from delivering the morning papers, instead of being at home in, and allowed into, a business and research community that was around before they came along?)

Of course if you treat the "underclass" (in America often the descendants of black slaves or of illiterate farmers from Asia and eastern Europe) as parasites and dumbheads and block their way to the good future, they are likely to keep on being criminals, hustlers, shirkers and liars - at least some of them - because that's all they get the place to do and that's the image of them projected everywhere. But it doesn't say much about their real potential. It's shortsighted to think that people from South Gate, LA and people from the Hamptons start from nearly the same baseline when it comes to education, money, health and exercise - or ability to get advanced work and get on the career ladder.