You're entirely missing the point. Children are dependents, and as such they should not be expected to take care of themselves. This is why we have laws which protect them against neglect. And exactly how are our laws which protect them "violent?"
Dependence is exactly the point: people who cannot help themselves require help, and it is morally justified to compel those who are able to help to do so. Once you allow that in to your ethical framework you can no longer justify libertarianism.
Not all poor are quadriplegic, there are people who can support themselves but choose not to. Furthermore, your argument wasn't that society should find a way to support quadriplegics, it was that society should find a way to support the 'poor', was it not?
A quadriplegic is just an extreme example of an adult who is not independent. Other examples are those who are temporarily or permanently disabled by injuries, etc. etc. These people cannot help themselves, and are therefore dependent on aid. It is morally imperative to assist these people, and the only way to guarantee they don't simply starve to death is with a legal assurance of aid. Yeah, it would be super if charity could handle everything, but it doesn't, and never has. Without a regulatory body to audit the charities they would be riddled with corruption, anyway. Libertarianism offers no solution to the need of those who cannot support themselves.
When I say 'poor' I mean those who cannot afford basic necessities for either themselves or their children. Food, shelter, basic medical care, education, etc.
I have no moral obligation to support the man who drinks himself into the gutter, and continues to do so despite repeated attempts to help him. I desire to see him change his ways for his own sake, but I see no reason why I should enable his lifestyle. And who are you to tell me that I should?
Alright, let's let the drunk die. What about his kids? Who will support them? Charity isn't enough in practice to do so. Libertarians are too quick to wave away the problems of neglected and orphaned children by just mumbling something about charity, when there already isn't anything stopping the wealthy from giving loads to charity, but they don't, and it isn't enough. There are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of children and elderly who
would not eat if it weren't for the millions of dollars in government aid they receive. If libertarians took over overnight, not only would they starve, but there would be no one to clean up the bodies, among other public health disasters that would ensue.
But we do have public transportation and we do have libraries, and the cost of using them is negligible. Now we want the government to provide not only medical care, but shelter too?
Government programs exist for everything mentioned above, and thank god. Perhaps that is part of the confusion, that libertarians take for granted those services which they rely on daily but are paid for by taxes.
Can you imagine if there way no public land at all, and you had to pay a fee to drive or even walk on roads? If the police only protected those who could pay? If the fire department only fought fires for those who could pay? There would be massive slums which would be dens of crime and disease, and would periodically burn. The US would regress into something resembling Bangladesh.
Sorry, I'd rather handle my own finances than to have some nanny government do it for me. At least then have the freedom of advancement, however difficult it may be, at least there is the possibility. I've got to live a life that's a little more dignified than that.
If you are only concerned with your own personal chances of advancing your career, of jumping up to a higher tax bracket, then you should consider moving to a country which is
more socialistic like France or Sweden, since they have better economic mobility. This is a statistical fact, it is how the world actually works.
Statistically, even if the only person in the world you care about is yourself and your money, you have a better chance of getting richer in a nation with more social support. Look at those stats I linked, go find other studies, they're out there. Let that fact sink in: your libertarian theories do not support the way the world actually work.
It is like the example I used of people being
more free in a socially-supported nation; if you don't have to struggle to eat or find shelter, even if you get laid off, you're more able to recover and get a better paying job. Simply having slightly higher taxes and more social support programs doesn't eliminate the advantages of a competitive market system, it just means you don't lose everything you own, including your life, if you can't find work.
And have you ever stopped to think what it would look like if America changed to socialism, if that is what you are proposing here? What would you hunt down all the richest people in America and tell them their money now belongs to the "community?" Of course they would all want to leave immediately, and you could tell them that they could go but their money must stay. Or you could just go the typical communist route, and put armed guards at the borders, with guns pointed in. Force people to participate in your perfect society. And this is probably what you would have to do, because all your skilled laborers would want to leave and go somewhere where they get paid better for their skills and talents.
The alternative to libertarianism isn't socialism, there is a wide range of systems under which to operate. Sweden, Norway, Germany, Finland, none of these countries had epidemics of murdering the wealthy. They merely transitioned to a state of welfare capitalism. People still get very rich on those countries, and some people are still very poor, but they all have additional social support that keeps slums and other public health issues from becoming problems.
It is interesting and very important to examine why the above countries didn't have bloody revolt, but other nations did. What kind of conditions led to the revolutions in France and Russia? Both revolutions were preceded by extreme disparities of wealth, and extreme poverty for large groups of people. People don't like to starve, and they don't like to see their kids starve either. People get angry and violent when they are neglected in favor of supporting the wealthy. They don't give a single rats posterior that there is some market theory that justifies their suffering. When people get desperate, they are likely to become violent and revolt, as they did in France and Russia.
If the governments of the time had supported those people, and (gasp!) actively redistributed wealth, there would never have been the kind of mass murder that arose. People who are well-fed and secure have no reason to risk death and prison by picking up a weapon and killing a rich person. The wealth was redistributed in any case, and to a much more extreme degree, so it isn't as if being stingy helped the wealthy at all.
In the case of the Russian revolution, the government fell partly because they were low on funds due to banning vodka instead of simply taxing it. A poor central authority can do little to protect the wealthy from the masses of angry poor.
Even without full-on revolt, it is safer for the average wealthy person to support social services. A hungry, desperate drug addict is far more likely to mug you on the streets than an addict who is safely in public housing and fed on cheap government food. They probably won't care that you earned your money honestly and have a bunch of theory to prove it. It's a matter of pragmatism, rather than dogma. Homicide, among other crimes, is
much less in socialistic countries vs. the US or other poor-regulated countries.
So, taking all of this into account, it is much better for an individual who wants to get wealthy, and keep their life and wealth, to support a system of welfare capitalism. Even if you're too childish to care about the suffering of others to want to part with even a fraction of your lucre, you should at least have enough sense of self-preservation to pay into a system which allows you to be comfortably wealthy without danger of losing your life.
