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Dr Strangelove
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quote:
Originally posted by Kuciwalker
I'd rather money be spent on something like education, or healthcare for a young, otherwise healthy person, than on extending some 90-year-old's life six months. |
Maybe that 90 year old is actually a 65 year old who watches over the kids so that Mom can go to work to provide for the family 'cause all the good jobs went somewhere else years ago and now it takes two breadwinners to support them. If you let granny die then they have to go on welfare. Hows about them apples? ....or maybe like in so many countries in the world Mom stays at work and the kids run free in the streets and join gangs by the time they're eight. City of God anyone?
Maybe Granny and Gramps are the only ones in the family with an iota of emotional stability. I have seen that time and time again. In the not too distant past gandparents were often the primary child caregivers of the family. You'd be surprised how much work it took to etch out a subsistance living on a farm or in a city prior to the successful development of electrical appliances and the internal combustion engine. Often 2 people, a man and a woman, working a farm would work beyond sun-up to sun-down just to make ends meet. Until some of the kids got old enough to lend signicant assistance having the old folks around to care for and teach the young ones was worth the food needed to sustain them. This basic pattern goes all the way back to the hunter - gatherer cultures.
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:16
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quote:
Imagine you opted out of police protection. Do you really think the police will tell you to **** off if you're ever raped (hint: the police even protects illegal aliens in dire circumstances) ? |
Because we have a Constitution, that affords them some protections. But let us assume we are not bound by that contract, the police will protect whom they are told to protect. If the people paying a tax for police protection want those police to protect everyone in the area, that's for them to decide. But if I don't want to pay the tax and I refuse protection, you cannot morally force me to accept protection much less pay a tax to pay for it. That is stealing even if it is "legal". That's why, while I have no problem supporting the local sheriff and would do so if free to choose, I oppose forcing my neighbors to pay for it too.
quote:
This is the reason why we use taxes instead of "opting in" and "opting out" possibilities. because when the crap hits the fan, we'd do help those in need, even if they didn't pay their taxes. This would make free-riding extremely easy, and everybody would do so. |
Then the people actually paying the tax can tell those who aren't they will no longer receive the service and most of them will see the wisdom of having the service. It is illogical to argue that everyone (a large majority?) will free ride if allowed given that a large majority of voters support forced taxation over the option to free ride. There is another moral component to this, I hate the fact my taxes are being used to incarcerate millions of people for using drugs. Many pro-lifers hate the fact their taxes are used to abort babies. Many liberals hate the fact their taxes are being used to invade Iraq. If we agree some action by government is immoral (and it is after a logical analysis), is it moral for us to compel our fellow man to pay taxes for that immoral policy?
How do "democrats" feel about letting voters earmark their taxes so they won't be forced to fund what they find immoral?
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:16
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quote:
that's not the reason, and you know it. |
It's exactly the reason. It's the same reason why private car insurance is compulsory in many countries.
Welfare systems don't really have that much to do with egalitarianism when you think about it. They are just the cheapest way to pay for certain kinds of insurance.
It's a practical matter. In addition, most people don't like the idea of their fellows living like dogs, and they don't like walking through crowds of insane homeless people. So welfare helps us satisfy those needs to.
But why not think of the consequences?
If you want to make welfare private, then lots of people will go without. But they won't just go away (why people on the right believe this is beyond me) or get living wage jobs (where the people on the right believe these jobs will magically come from is beyond me).
No. They'll engage in criminal activity like shoplifting and burglary.
"So what?", say the righties, "We'll stick them all in jail if they commit crimes!"
OK. Who's going to pay for all these incarcerations?
"We'll make them work in prison!!!"
Great! You've just reintroduced a form of slavery. More to the point, the prisoners will be taking jobs away from ordinary citizens, who will then find themselves in the same position as the criminals used to be in.
"Well, we need to increase the penalties for these sorts of crimes!!!"
When you are stealing in order to maintain a basic standard of living, the penalty has to be pretty stiff to be effective.
"OK. Let's reintroduce the death penalty for theft!!!!"
If you wanted to take us back to the 18th century with its workhouses and the death penalty for stealing bread, why didn't you just say so in the first place?
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:16
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quote:
It's a pointless waste of time and money. Part of living in a society is that you occasionally have to do things you don't like, have to put up with things you don't like, and suffer people you don't like.
But hey, everyone else is in the same position. Accepting it is called "growing up". |
Then upon what basis would you oppose using taxes to commit immoral acts? Forcing others to fund immoral behavior is not "growing up", it is the expedient action of the physically strong but morally weak.
But it isn't pointless, much of what government does is called "pork" or worse. How many people would pay taxes so Bob Dole can appropriate money from the treasury for an agricultural museum in Kansas? How many people would actually earmark taxdollars to chase pot smokers as terrorists are running around? Fiscal sanity depends on prioritising and the people paying the taxes are better at it than the politicians spending the taxes.
quote:
It's exactly the reason. It's the same reason why private car insurance is compulsory in many countries. |
If the owners of those roads won't let people drive them without insurance, they have the moral authority to require insurance. That is a flawed analogy since you don't have the moral authority to come into my home and demand that I help pay for your police protection.
Last edited by Berzerker on 23-12-2004 at 07:36
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Agathon
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Leafs 4TW!! - CPA
Dec 2002
time: 00:16
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quote:
You don't have to be so hard on them, misguided will do. |
I find it amusing that someone who believes in an extremely spurious doctrine of natural rights for which he can offer no reasonable argument should be laughing at another right claim that is also offered without argument 
quote:
Then upon what basis would you oppose using taxes to commit immoral acts? Forcing others to fund immoral behavior is not "growing up", it is the expedient action of the physically strong but morally weak. |
We live in a contractarian society. In such societies people agree to disagree over most of what we would call moral issues, and leave the law to a few issues which most people agree on (like serious physical harm to other people).
This means that people will pay tax that might go to fund a homosexual dance troupe or something else they find disagreeable. On the other hand, the homosexual dance troupers will probably be subsidizing church events (since religious organizations get hefty tax breaks). Neither likes what the other does, but if both can put up with the other leading their own lives, then both are happier.
This is how our societies are organized, and there's a spectacularly good reason for it. We cannot achieve many of our goods without collective action, and the larger a society gets the more diverse the opinions of its members on what constitutes the good life grow.
In the old days this was solved by the law siding with the majority and persecuting the infidels. But this doesn't work. So contractarian societies developed in which everyone is expected to contribute and receives the benefit of not having the state intefere in their sex life or their religious life unless they are harming others.
This is so obvious that it shouldn't need to be repeated... but..
quote:
But it isn't pointless, much of what government does is called "pork" or worse. How many people would pay taxes so Bob Dole can appropriate money from the treasury for an agricultural museum in Kansas? How many people would actually earmark taxdollars to chase pot smokers as terrorists are running around? Fiscal sanity depends on prioritising and the people paying the taxes are better at it than the politicians spending the taxes. |
Of course there will be problems with any sort of economic organization. I get annoyed that my phone bill costs what it does because the phone company flies its executives off to Hawaii for "motivational sessions".
But if the alternative is worse, then we just have to put up with it and reform where we can.
For example, some government programs are inefficient (not all - public health care is actually a lot less bureaucratic than private systems) but if those programs provide something that people really need and at an acceptable cost and which the market would either fail to provide or provide at a massively inflated cost, it is worth putting up with the inefficiency.
Everyone gets pissed off with government waste. But hey, corporations waste money too, which we pay for in higher prices. But these are just the costs of the kind of society we have. In the absence of any evidence that privatizing everything is a panacea, it is best to try for incremental reforms where it can demonstrably do some good.
quote:
If the owners of those roads won't let people drive them without insurance, they have the moral authority to require insurance. That is a flawed analogy since you don't have the moral authority to come into my home and demand that I help pay for your police protection. |
Why would a road owner care about that? The road owner is not responsible for people who have accidents on his road. If they damage the road, they have to pay him, but he owes nothing to the other people they hit - and to force him to would violate your conception of his rights.
If I owned a road I would expressly state that I was not responsible for accidents due to bad driving, since I would want more people to use it and it doesn't bother me if they are insured or not.
Of course you could argue that insured people would pay more to drive on roads that only allowed the insured, but that would involve a ridiculously inefficient amount of redundant road building, involving two different systems of roads.
More to the point, it would be extremely difficult to check who was insured and who was not. In a libertarian society people are going to object to having their cars bugged.
So people will attempt to free ride by driving without insurance or by being underinsured, knowing that if they hit someone else whom they can't afford to pay, the other person will just have to suck it up.
You can either go through the expensive rigmarole of trying to work out who is insured and who isn't, or you can force people to take responsibility for themselves by having the government pass a law that you cannot drive uninsured on pain of jail time.
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Patroklos
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Back home in good ole Norfolk VA
Dec 2001
time: 05:16
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quote:
Yeah, some really crazy people think medical care is a human right. What morons... |
Damn straight, but since you decided to use a sorry example or sarcasm, please provide me the legal source for your right to medical care.
Then again that isn't really what I said is in Sava, god forbid you actually addressed a poster's actual words.
quote:
For some reason people assume medical care to be a right as opposed to the consumer service it is |
And you have every right to use your personal resources to procure said services. Hell, use all of them if you want, its your money.
However, as Agathon said given the state of our society there is no reason we can not provide BASIC medical care for everone. Flu vacinations count, hip replacements don't. But just because it is within our means to provide that service in no way makes it a right.
But that is okay Save, go exercise your "right" to bus service, and have fun excercising your "right" to use the Interstates.
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23-12-2004 03:02
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