anaisnein:

kiwiria:

anaisnein:

That’s just such black and white thinking.

Look — does it never occur to you that you can be a thoroughly responsible person who plans and executed a sensible and productive life and still get hit with bad luck? A car hits you, or you’re diagnosed with an expensive cancer or chronic disease. And you think you’re covered, because people like you are covered for this shit, right, but nope, you get caught in some shitty insurance company escape clause and there you are: screwed. Or: all your sensible planning is upended out of nowhere by a seismic shift in the business or regulation or tax or technology landscape, or a war, or a natural disaster, and yes the same insurance bullshit applies there. (You can also of course be *born* with a disability or expensive medical condition, or get hit at two or nine or thirteen or nineteen, and just when exactly are you supposed to have exercised your native virtuous responsibility and organized yourself a proper adult life with the kind of cash flow and reserves and insurance that would in theory make that kind of disaster weatherable? Except that it wouldn’t, because turns out you can’t trust private insurance companies to honor *their* responsibilities, they’re here for profit just like the rest of us and will use their corporate clout to drop your responsible virtuous ass like a hot potato?)

Many people who have good jobs and enough money and functional lives seem to have this incredible sense of invulnerability where they believe they’ll always be among the haves because just world + Calvinist virtue, and I’m sorry, but bullshit. Bad things happen to good people all the fucking time. The reason these people see a social safety net as incompatible with responsibility is that they have this bone-deep conviction that the whole reason they’re doing well is their personal excellence and upstanding ways, so clearly it’s not possible that they’ll ever be the one who needs the safety net; they’ve put in their time credentialing, work hard, have savings and insurance, are paying down their mortgages, obviously they’ll be fine, good productive middle-class people don’t need handouts from the govmint.

Chances are they’re right and it’ll all go fine for them. But if not, my own preference is for the rich, putatively decent, putatively First World country that they live in to have put a motherfucking safety net in place under them and their families, so they don’t end up broke in the streets or dying for want of what should be affordable treatment (let’s leave designer cancer drugs at 250K per patient-year to a separate argument, I’m talking necessary chronic treatments costing much less than that. Insulin should be available, okay. For free, if you need it and can’t pay. I will die on that hill.)

I talk about “safety nets” and not “welfare” because the beneficiary is everybody. Me. You. It’s literally for myself that I worry, not just for all the people who’ve already been hit by the bad luck lotto in one way or another. I’m not in my teens or twenties any more, I’m generally privileged but also have a nonzero number of structural disadvantage points, I do not share this delusion of invulnerability and I do not trust my entitlement or privilege further than I can throw it. We’re all human and we’re all at risk (barring the super-rich, by which I mean those with high enough investment income not to ever have to depend on a paycheck again even if expensive catastrophe) and tbqfh I Don’t Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care About Other People.

I love anaisnein’s answer and I don’t want to detract from that at all, but I just need to respond to this, because the original question just makes no sense to me.

Safety nets and responsibility being incompatible? I’d rather ask how are safety nets and responsibility not two sides of the same coin?

Let’s forget all about the figurative meanings of “safety net” and go back to the literal one. Where are safety nets most often seen? Underneath people who are performing high above ground. Tightrope walkers. Trapeze artists.

How are they anything BUT responsible for using a safety net? Wouldn’t it be the height of irresponsibility to forego it?

If I see a tight rope walker performing up high without a safety net I walk away. Or I turn off the TV. I don’t want to see somebody being THAT stupid – THAT irresponsible.

…

Put the figurative meaning back into the phrase, and I actually don’t view it any differently. Having a safety net in place doesn’t mean that you never take chances, or that you expect others to catch you. It just means that you’re sensible about it, and that you take responsibility for your actions by providing yourself with a safe place to land – in case you need it.

the above is exactly what I meant, and perfectly illuminates why it doesn’t make any sense to see “safety net” and “responsibility” as binary opposed/incompatible approaches to risk.