>'Welfare doesn't eliminate deprivation, it just changes the avenues through which deprivation emerges.' Deprivation is the lack of material things. People wit

>'Welfare doesn't eliminate deprivation, it just changes the avenues through which deprivation emerges.' Deprivation is the lack of material things. People without universal healthcare or benefits systems in unpropitious circumstances will have neither healthcare nor shelter and food. Ergo, welfare alleviates deprivation. That follows logically. It is also the incontrovertible historical picture. I have heard many arguments against the welfare system, but I have never heard anyone argue that providing people with life-saving medicine or food to eat makes them materially worse off. I don't know by what ideological self-contraption you have been able to convince yourself of that. >'I'm saying that people are always going to be mired in materialist competition with those on the losing end seeing relative deprivation. That is a property of the world, not of capitalism... Humans absolutely do possess innate impulses. Humans share 96% of their DNA of chimpanzees, 90% of cats, and 85% of mice. We are not fundamentally that different from other animals, and numerous studies demonstrate the massive influence that innate traits play on our behaviour.' Once again, this is under-specified. I am arguing that one of the roles of the welfare state is to create the basis for humans to give themselves to non-economic activities: to culture, community, politics, ethics, and so on. That is compatible with the fact that humans are to some extent competitive. You seem to be saying that humans are sufficiently competitive that this would only displace their competitiveness into new domains. But you have shown nothing of the sort. You claim that we have innate impulses. I wouldn't use the word impulses, but I agree that there is such a thing as human nature. You say that we share most of our DNA with chimpanzees, cats and mice. That's true enough. But then you leap from these two platitudinous claims to the idea that human nature is both fixed and determinate. I see no reason whatsoever to believe that. Take two of the strongest genetic determinists that I know of. Steven Pinker argues in the The Better Angels of Our Nature that our psychology is made up of a number of dispositions and that human history consists of our changing our environment such as to change the balance and strength of those dispositions. In other words, our psychology is majorly conditioned by our social conditions. Robert Plomin, the world's leading genetic determinist, argues - and his claims are far stronger that most geneticists - that even physical traits like height, weight and eyesight are only partially (30-70%) accounted for by genes. In other words, neither of them claim anything like what you seem to be arguing: that we have fixed dispositions (not dispositions which change in balance and strength) which strictly determine (not tendentially shape) human behaviour. I happen to disagree strongly with both Pinker and Plomin for the reason I gave previously. Humans are radically different from other animals because non-genetic learning - culture, norms, social practices, meaning - accounts for more of our behaviour than our genes do. Hence why human change occurs in historical time and not, like other animals, in evolutionary time. >'That's overly simplistic'. You are changing the question. We are talking about whether humans are always and at all times moved by self-interest in the same way and to the same degree. In my scenario they are clearly not. I note that you do not disagree with that judgement, i.e. you implicitly concede that in that hypothetical those two people are moved by self-interest in different ways. Instead, you claim that that scenario is impossible. I would engage with your reasoning but it's a red herring - it is nothing but misdirection from the relevant question. >'As for contract liberty being a euphemism, you wouldn't be saying that if the state imprisoned you for entering into a contract with another consenting adult.' This is rhetoric. It is both possible to think that 'contract liberty' is a euphemism that conceals the fact that many contracting parties do so from structurally asymmetrical positions, and to think that arbitrary imprisonment is wrong. What you are saying depends on the theory of negative liberty first propounded by Thomas Hobbes, where liberty is the absence of physical interference. I take that to be manifestly wrong. We don't want to be interfered with, because we want to be able to do things. But negative liberty only secures us the former, not the latter. For example, it does me no good if the police permit me to use the train to see my family if I don't have the money to pay for the train to see my family, if I am starving to death, or if I need to work all hours of the day to keep a roof over my head.