If it were me, I'd start by acknowledging that her views *do* make sense and do hold true for a lot of people. I know a *lot* of people who moved away from Socialist countries (mostly Sweden, for some reason) to the US for exactly the reasons she states -- they were working hard but felt like all their money was going to taxes and that they couldn't advance as far as they liked, so they wanted to go somewhere where their work would benefit them more. I would assume this would also apply to a lot of poorer immigrants as well, that they're coming to the US to be in a place that rewards them for their work and where there's some degree of social mobility.

The issue becomes, What happens to people who can't work hard? What happens to people who get sick, who have extensive disabilities, who need time off to care for children or elderly/sick/disabled relatives? What happens to people who want to work but are held back due to sexism, racism, homophobia, or other bias? What happens to the super-smart baby who's born to poor apathetic parents, who doesn't have the money or informational resources to go to private schools, who has to skip school and take care of his younger siblings when his parents OD, etc.

It's one thing to penalize people who don't work hard because they don't feel like it. It's another to penalize people from birth for being born into difficult circumstances.

The question that you and your mom is debating is a philosophical one, not one of facts: What responsibility do we, as a society, have to those in bad circumstances? Do we leave them to fend for themselves because they'll find more motivation that way, or do we actively work to get them to a better, more productive place, even if it seems paternalistic? That's a quite valid debate, and there are tons of valid arguments to be made on both side, supported by tons of valid facts. Though I tend to fall very far on the "We need to ensure basic needs are met through public institutions" side of that debate, I actually think a healthy society needs to have people arguing for both viewpoints so that it finds its way to a healthy middle-ground -- providing services to but not infantilizing its citizens.

(Also, I don't know how old you or your mother is, but one thing that I've found about debating upward mobility is that it *did* used to be much more possible -- at least for white people -- than it is today, and I think older people are sometimes not aware of how much that's changed, because they grew up surrounded by a lot of success stories of the mail clerk who became CEO. That was a real possibility in the past; not so much today.)

A practical note on technique: I think I've had the most luck getting Bootstraps folks to at least see my point of view when I've focused on how wealth and resource disparities affect children (and then how those effects continue to get magnified throughout the child's life, due to those early issues), because it's harder to argue that a three-year-old should have known better than to live in dangerous areas, attend bad schools, drink contaminated water, have no health insurance, or work at a low-paying job. That can sometimes also work as a "Yes, your friend X managed to do quite well, despite being born poor/black/disabled/Cuban/etc. Now imagine that he was born to parents who didn't value education, or was too sick to work full-time, or had parents who couldn't afford to send him to private schools. Do you think he'd have achieved as much? Would that have been his fault?"

Part of what you're arguing about is how much control people really have over their own life circumstances. Gently pointing out that we have less control than we like to think may be helpful in getting your mother to see your point of view.

oh wow, occhiblu! you have been EXTREMELY helpful.

my mom is 50 and her grandma (my great grandma) was definitely a bootstrapper...came of age during Great Depression, had to quit school at 6th grade to help support family, got a job at local factory and worked her way to being a department supervisor and very well paid and was able to retire quite nicely. great gma also got married when she was 14 or 16 and had a kid before she was 18, and the husband left when the kid (my grandfather) was 10, yet she was still able to overcome a lot and live a comfortable life.

so even in our own family we do have the actualization of the american dream.

i see now the roadblock i've been running into, that it's philosophical not something fact based. i knew i was going about the argument the wrong way but wasn't sure why it was wrong.

i've done some research on economic disparities and how it affects education and health care, so i'll have to revisit that stuff. that seems like an excellent way to go. she was a welfare caseworker for almost a decade and knows that they system is very broken. she had plenty of scammers, but she also felt very badly that there were plenty of people who had ended up in the system due to completely uncontrollable circumstances and that the system was so screwed up that she couldn't help a lot of people who really needed it. as well as there being plenty of people who WANTED to work but the discrepancy between what they'd earn at their entry level job and the loss of benefits from welfare was too great to make working affordable or practical.

i definitely feel that i can find something to focus on now.

thanks so much!

If you're on MeFi, a great to place to ask this question is AskMe. Similar ones have come up there, so you might want to search and/or ask yourself.

I have a lot of thoughts on this question but not really time to expand upon them. A few:

1. Redistribution of wealth - we are a nation with a controlled capitalist economic system, but we are not a pure capitalist nation and never have been. We have decided, as a society, that there are legal limits on ways to make money (for instance, selling harmful drugs on the street isn't a legitimate way to make money which we support via our system, despite the fact that under pure capitalism it would be). Chances are that your mom takes advantage, or will take advantage, of "socialist" programs - the home ownership tax credit. Social security. Medicare and Medicare Part B. What's more, anyone who's ever attended a public education facility or a public or private university has benefitted from programs that support the intellectual and professional development of a nation's workforce and citizenship.

We have also decided as a nation, long long ago, that taxes and involuntary contributions are necessary to achieve national goals - such as national self-defense, and many others. It's not whether there should be goals, but what those goals should be and who should be taxed to meet them and how much, that usually creates disagreement. Second, the "redistribution" idea cuts both ways. Wealth is already being redistributed by our capitalist system. Wealth (money resulting from productivity) is leaving the hands of the hard worker more rapidly than at any time in the last century, and being concentrated at the uppermost income tiers. The L Curve is an interesting look at this. Real wages have been stagnant for 40 years. People in the middle class are doing much less well than ever before. Tuition and health care and home ownership cost much more, but there haven't been concomitant increases in wages. That's because those increases have been diverted, through active policy, to the already wealthy. And if we don't have a robust middle class with spending money, we have basically no hope of reviving the economy. Policy needs to shift wealth back where it belongs - to the sectors of population which directly generated it, through their work.

much of the other stuff i find seems to be just opinion (Salon or The Nation).

The problem here is that basically it comes down to "just opinion" - or ideology, anyway. There are all kinds of governments in the world, from skeletal inactive governments to controlling totaliatrian ones. Each are legitimate forms in that they exist until they collapse. The question isn't "what's the exact right form of government," but "what are our shared values, and what kind of governance will create the best conditions for them to flourish?"

So if your mom values work, that's great. But we don't have a system that ensures that anyone and everyone who works hard will be rewarded with a stable and financially secure working life. And we can't control for fate - illness, accident, a family member's illness - or easily overcome poor early learning and advantages, like occhiblu said. So regardless of how much we value hard work - and believe me, I do too - the current social and economic and government system isn't structured in order to make it possible for anyone who works hard to get ahead. In fact, it actively punishes many workers and penalizes them, making it harder to get ahead. Is there anyone you know who can serve as an example? Someone whose progress has been held back by a lack of medical coverage or an inability to get needed training? What about you or people you know? When my parents were my age, neither had a college degree, but both worked in professional fields. My mom worked only part-time while we were little, so we were supported mostly by my dad alone. We had regular medical checkups and doctors and medication when we needed them. we had regular dental checks too. We had shoes and clothes for school, and, though we qualified for reduced-income lunch, we didn't really need to use it, so we didn't. We had a car and sometimes two cars. My parents bought their first home when they were 29 and 31, respectively.

Could a family like that be imagined as easily today? Two non-degree-holders with two young kids, on a job and a half, who enjoy affordable medical care, adequate meeting of needs for food and clothing, transportation, and home ownership? It's rarer and rarer.

Anyway, I guess my point is to try to dig down to your shared values, and ask whether this present system really lives up to those values. If you value hard work and individual determination, that's great, but it raises the questions: 1. Does the system really fairly reward hard work for everyone who works hard? and 2. What happens when someone can't work - temporarily or permanently - or when even their hardest work isn't sufficient for them to survive and meet their family's needs with costs rising so steeply? 3. When those who can't work still have needs - housing, food, education - are the costs of meeting their needs with social welfare less than the costs of supporting them after they've had severely negative outcomes? On this point it's easy to find facts that say NO. More people in jail, more people getting expensive ER care for advanced conditions instead of preventative care, more people on the street becoming sicker and less education and running into serious trouble, higher crime rates resulting from greater desperation, less educated future workforce creating more incentive for outsourcing...etc. Often, the social-welfare solution is cheaper and more efficient to society in the end than allowing some portion of the population to drop out of the net and then picking up the pieces later with expensive programs that only reach them at the extremity of a serious condition. And finally, if we want a healthy economy of mostly employed people, how do we get one without ensuring that that employed population has money to spend on goods and services for themselves and their dependents?

Only if ideology trumps values is there nowhere to go. That's true for some hardline conservatives and teapartiers. I'm not sure if your mom is that far out there - some people are. But maybe by starting the conversation by asking her about the America she wants, the America she dreams of - and then asking whether current policy is getting us there - you can find some common ground, and show that you actually want many of the same things, but want to reach them by another path you are convinced is smarter, more efficient, and more humane.

Glad to be of help!

provided either of you check back here...

could you recommend some books or longer form journalism you have found helpful or insightful along these lines?

i would make this an askme but need to forumlate it a bit...i guess i would be asking for books/articles/podcasts/media that deal with the questions of what a society should provide for its members and to what degree? does that sound right?

Wish I did...I'm afraid my thoughts aren't a result of focused study, just a worldview developed over time with input from lots of sources ...I'm just now realizing that a "theory of government" class I took in college was probably a major influence. Um, I read across a lot of platforms to keep up, so it's hard to think about specifics. I always like hearing from Robert Reich, and some of his books deal with exactly this question. Paul Krugman is great on the issue of economic inequality and how it hurts economic development, and he writes regular columns for the New York Times. Savage Inequalities and Jonathan Kozol's other works are powerful indictments of the present socioeconomic system's impact on individual opportunity. Kevin Phillips is a former Republican strategist who became alarmed at the dangerous economic policy they've been pursuing since Goldwater, and now brilliantly chronicles the ways in which "financialization" creates a house-of-cards economy. George Lakoff's book Moral Politics gives a pretty intersting and fairly strong theory about how many people develop their political worldviews based on childhood experience in the family rather than an analytical process based on observation. In addition I just try to stay pretty up on things, read the New Yorker, the NY Times, the Boston Globe, sometimes the Economist (which is pretty interesting because its editorial stance is basically socially and politically liberal but very free-market-leaning, so it provides a good counterpoint to think about and test one's ideas), whatever people send me links to, listen to NPR news and Marketplace and On the Media..these sources all kind of mash together and dovetail to inform my views, so I can't say there's any one book, writer, or article that has a road map to breaking things down in discussions about what's best for the country.
I'm 100% sure you'll get better political-theory recommendations on MeFi and your question looks prety well formulated to me already.

I think I was born with my worldview -- I seek out blogs and books that agree with it, but I can't say that I have anything to recommend that explain it.