Consider this, because somebody gave you a car, or somebody gave me a $1000 check, it kept us on the upwardly moving socioeconomic ladder, ensuring that our taxes would become many times what they would have been had we stayed working hourly low waged jobs. Consider if those things had been paid for out of the tax base, thus putting a net positive back into the system.
For sake of comparison, a few friends of mine from where I grew up could't stick with the living hell of it all and didn't finish college (those that tried) for a wide variety of reasons (very few of those reasons were laziness), I paid around the same in taxes each year over the last five years than any of them made in salary during the same period. They're effectively making the same wage working today as they made in their early 20s, thus greatly lowering the tax base that they could have provided back into the system.
I can't say that a single pivotal act of state-sponsored charity would have turned their lives around and made them into vastly more productive citizens, but a few dollars here and a discount there could have been all it took. Who knows?
I think my point is that putting it in terms of who "owes" what, is probably not the right model. If the system isn't dysfunctional, you can trivially calculate what the average family of n requires, and make sure that the working adults in that family, working a full-time job, can earn enough to make that if working full-time is what they choose to do. A medical surprise or an auto repair or what have you shouldn't be something that derails their entire lives.
In my case, we were both living spartan, but comfortable, lives after college for around $40k per year combined (my first job after graduating). This is with a $900/mo apartment, one car payment, and no children. We ate out once or twice a week, and cooked in the rest. We had enough to clothe ourselves professionally and keep the lights on when we wanted them (not when we needed them), not eat absolute garbage three meals a day, and a few hours at the end of the day in "free-time". It works out to about $20/hr.
And turns out that the literature shows that in my area, a living wage for 2 adults is shown to be $19.25 [1]
Now there's an argument that there should be jobs that aren't living wage. Unskilled, extremely low end jobs, like fast food restaurants, they should pay enough to get people into the work force, but motivate them to move up and above that. It's an interesting bit of social engineering. But it has a problem that's not always overcome. That's because the minimum wage is like a speed limit. It's the default setting unless some other factor causes you to deviate from it like a lack of a hiring pool.
and me having committed suicide out of despair and depression 20+ years ago
Obviously should have a "not" insert in there. That or I'm posting from The Other Side... :-)
This may not be a very popular position, but I disagree. I don't think society owes a single one of us anything. By what possible mechanism could they be said to incur that obligation anyway?
Now, you could argue that it's in the best interests of society-as-a-whole to provide those basic affordances, and I think certain results in game-theory would support that argument. But, to my way of thinking, there's still no reason to expect that "society" will guarantee anything for any one individual.
Maybe I'm just weird in this regard, but at nearly 40, I'm still unmarried... biggest reason? I grew up dirt poor, never felt like I could afford to start a family, and so never seriously pursued marriage... and I was obsessive about spending my time trying to ramp myself up the socio-economic ladder so that one day I could do things that mattered to me.
Now at this age, whether or not I ever do get married is a whole new question, for a variety of reasons. But the point is, I - for one - never had any expectation that society should provide for me to an adequate level that I could marry and skimp out on hard work.
All of that said, I received various random acts of charity throughout my younger years and, looking back on it all, I think I agree with the gist of TFA. Some of those random acts came at critical junctures and probably made a huge difference in me achieving what I have achieved, and me having committed suicide out of despair and depression 20+ years ago. Somebody gave me a car once, when mine had broken down. That enabled me to keep working and keep going to school, when the alternative would have been a complete shuddering stop to my progress.
But, as appreciated as that was, I appreciate it as a gift and see no reason to believe that anybody owed me that.