Perhaps in the same sense that living on a planet with air makes you richer.
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And that’s why this hillbilly will be keeping all of his big, scary, horrifying, evil guns. Dekulakization can go on without me and mine, thank you very much.
I want to fix the situation too, but in a way that expands liberty. As for being on the wrong side of said guillotine, that’s what the Second Amendment is for.
Let me get this straight: you’re stockpiling an actual, non-metaphorical arsenal so you’ll be ready to kill others in the event of an out-of-control government and/or popular uprising, but you are chastising ME for making a reference to guillotines.
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no. you’re confusing senses of words.
are you “richer” with a social net? in that your life is livable and therefore your life is “enriched”, yes. are you more rich in an economic sense? absolutely not.
“social assistance” goes into your hands and out again. it immediately goes to food, shelter, healthcare. it does not make you economically wealthier in any way.
income can be turned into wealth, and wealth can be turned into income. but they are not simply interchangeable.
the first requires you to have all of your base life needs met, and then have money to spare. the second means you have such a large nestegg that you can invest it and see meaningful returns.
those are the economics behind those words. food stamps will never ever make you rich. ( unless you own a part of jp morgan chase since they’re the bank supplying all the cards.)
now, there are things that could be considered assistance that can be used to obtain income, and with enough income leveraged to produce wealth.
public education, public roads, public buses, public employment ( ex. librarians, school teachers, soldiers ) all fall in that category.
those are “investments” in each other. but, they are not investments as in actual capital.
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If enough people are riled up enough against the plutocrats, all the second amendment means is it will be a firing squad instead of a guillotine.
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Nope. I’m maintaining my small collection so I’ll be ready in the unlikely event someone does build a guillotine and attempts to introduce me to it on a personal basis. In the meantime, I’ll just be hunting water bottles and paper targets shaped like turkeys and squirrels.
My reference to the guillotine was a metaphor. It is highly unlikely that that particular means of execution would be employed by any provisional revolutionary government in the 21st Century.
Actually the people who make the most noise about overthrowing our current government are the ones who love to talk about how they keep guns so they’ll be ready when the time comes.
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If it gets to the point of executions, people on either side aren’t going to care whether the method is by guillotine, shooting or à la lanterne.
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I very much like our current form of government. I’ve grown somewhat attached to it in the last 65 years. Metaphors about guillotines thrown around easily and without thought tend to make folks nervous.
Yeah, you’re making some unfounded assumptions about my income. I’m basically homeless right now, if they decide that my share of the pie is attractive enough to go after I’ll have already died.
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Then I have to wonder how you feel about all the Second Amendment absolutists who talk about firearms as a form of protection against a “tyrannical” government (often defined as “a government that does stuff they don’t like”).
If you get scared by our metaphorical discussion about non-existent guillotines then imagine how we feel about your non-metaphorical firearms that actually kill tens of thousands of Americans every single year.
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That probably explains a lot about why so many libertarians adore sci-fi settings, so that the air on the space station can be privately owned.
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really didn’t, there are no assumptions in my comment, which was about wealth, not income.
Cheers m8.
Holy crap, my firearms got out? They killed tens of thousands of people? How the hell did they do that? They were in the safe last night and they’re still in the safe this morning.
I have to admit, the idea of self-aware, self-teleporting firearms does scare the hell out of me. You might be on to something.
You just said it’s reasonable for people to nervous when discussion turns to guillotines, a device that has killed precisely zero people worldwide since 1977. Yet you mock people for fearing firearms, which kill over 30,000 people annually in the U.S. alone.
Methinks your ability to evaluate relative risk may be wanting.
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But they can’t really count public health and pensions as increased wealth because before these abominations it was already all taken care of by families and charity. They say these programs reduce wealth by adding government costs to what was already being taken care of by the private sector. /s
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When guillotines stand for some sort of violent social uprising that turns into dekulakization? That’s reasonable grounds for nerves.
When one old guy sits in his house with guns locked in his safe, threatening only the odd paper squirrel or Walmart water bottle? Not quite.
Statistically speaking, you are infinitely more likely to meet your end via one of your own non-metaphorical firearms than by my as-yet-entirely-imaginary guillotine.
Anyway, when we say “your guns kill tens of thousands of people a year” we aren’t talking about your guns specifically. If a non-automobile-driver says “your death machines kill tens of thousands of people on our roads ever year” I understand that they aren’t accusing me personally of killing tens of thousands of people with my minivan, but rather discussing the human toll of automobiles in general.
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Ah, but you think he’s a kulak, and you want to chop off his head and make free with the sweat of his brow in some kind of redistributive frenzy, you Maniacal Marxist! What’s a brave hillbilly to do but stockpile guns with an existential threat like that haunting their internet tubes? Eh? Eh?
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