"George M. Middius" wrote in message
...


I took a spin over to some of the overtly political Usenet groups. Amid
the usual namecalling, baseless generalizing, chest-thumping, and
exultations of stupidity, I educed a common theme among the retrograde
claque. They all think taxes are unjust, unnecessary, immoral, etc.
Similar to the braying we see on RAO from certain people whom I don't
need to name because we all know who you are.

One thought that keeps surfacing is that the government "takes" money
from people who "earned" it, and these citizens hate that.

Yes. Unless there's a voluntary tax collection method.

I've seen this
thought expressed so many times that I almost becamse numb to its
inherent stuipdity. After all, we (the U.S. electorate) re-elected our
worst President in my lifetime, and possibly in the whole country's
lifetime.

You're in a time warp George, this is not the Roosevelt Administration.

And why did most of us vote for him? Fear, that's why.

That's not what the polling data says.

Not real
fear, but fear of imaginary evils. Boy, are we stupid!

Yes you are.

But even against that backdrop, the foolishness about taxes is
extraordinarily stupid. The main point is that our taxes are among the
lowest in countries with standard of living that's similar to ours.

And that means what regarding the morality of taking from people who earn?

A few
are a tiny bit lower, such as Switzerland and Finland. But I don't think
it's wise to compare the U.S. to those countries, for a variety of
reasons.


Too much ****ing snow.

My point about taxes is that people are able to earn good livings in this
country because of our infrastructure, which was built with tax money and
is maintained through tax money and will be improved through tax money.

But could have been done privately for less.

If you run a business, do you really think the amount you pay your
employees represents the true cost of the value of their work?

How do you determine such value? The market decides such things.

It does
not. The transportation network was not free, you know. Nor is education.
Do you want to hire people who can't read at high school level?

All the more reason to abolish public schools or institute a voucher system,
since that's exactly what public schools have produced all too often.

Do you
want to have to train people to use computers?

If necessary.

Do you want to build your
own roads?

Will it get me where I want to go? Will there be a response to the demand
for more of them that is comensurate with that demand?

Do you want to build your own power lines to connect to the
electric company, and your own sewer lines so you can have indoor
plumbing? Remember, our taxes are among the lowest for industrialized
countries.


Is it impossible to hire people to do those things without involving
government? The government does essentially the same thing, they hire
people to do it.

The real problem is government waste. Is it worse than in large
companies?

Large companies have to make a profit, they have an incentive to not be
wasteful, government has no such incentive.

The biggest money pit in the government is the military. But
you "conservatives" love the guns and battleships and fighter jets. It's
just that you don't want to pay for them.


If that were part of the short list of things that government actually
should spend money on, it wouldn't be so bad. It's much easier to keep an
eye on a few things than on hundreds of things.

It comes down to what you think the purpose of government is. My conviction
is that governments are necessary to protect the rights of individuals. To
do this they need methods of enforcement, methods of investigation, and
methods of adjudication. They also need money to do such things, and the
Constitution outlined ways for the collection of such monies.
There are other ways they can collect money that don't require force, such
as lotteries.

Other people have other ideas about what the role of government should be in
people's lives. I just don't want government to be able to force people to
give it money.