Government Wealth Redistribution

Finally, something a bit more interesting. For the record, I'm pretty glad you didn't want to debate about abortion. I'm getting pretty sick of the topic. And I apologize for taking so long to respond. But anyhow. Firstly, what's all this about goodwill? Goodwill has nothing to do with it. The difference is that (at least right now) it is the government's job to take care of the poor and they are held accountable to it. Obviously, ordinary citizens are not. It doesn't matter if politicians don't have much goodwill personally, because if they're doing the jobs we elected them for, then they're going to be taking care of the poor. If you got rid of this facet of our government, then no one would be accountable for helping the poor and we would rely on this ‘goodwill' you mentioned for any form of financial aid or healthcare or whatever. Of course, the downside of goodwill is that if people don't feel like helping others, they don't have to. The government absolutely has to help people. If they stop paying financial aid, they're in trouble. If I stop donating to the salvation army guy on the sidewalk, no one's going to punish me for it. What makes you so sure that the only reason people don't donate to charity is because of taxes? My argument is that if taxes were lowered, the majority of those people wouldn't be thinking, ‘hey, now I have more money to donate to charity', but something more along the lines of ‘hey, now I can afford that hummer.' It's not necessarily that people are heartless and cruel and don't care, (although I won't deny that some are) but that they just get wrapped up in their own lives and forget about the poor. We Americans have short memories. Everyone donates right after a major disaster, but if it's a long and ongoing thing, donations taper off. For example, let's look at Katrina again. New Orleans is still literally rotting, and people need money almost as much as they did right after the hurricane. However, no one donates any more, because we've essentially forgotten about it. After the initial rush of donations, no one wants to help. It's the sort of thing you generally run into with people, because we've got our own lives and are often occupied by other things. We're not necessarily cruel, just forgetful. I'm not necessarily saying the government's charitable, I'm saying it's supporting the poor. Again, people in power may not like to help people, but they are legally obligated to. And since when is helping the poor not ‘public good', anyway? Besides, a lot of the things you want to get rid of do benefit you anyway. Social security? Medicare? "If those families will not provide charity because of their financial situation, how does that imply taking their money would be better? Taking the money they cannot afford to give would make the situation much worse." Simple. Taxes are levied on everyone. If you get rid of taxes, then only the people who want to donate will. Therefore, less people will be giving money to the poor. If less people donate, each will have to donate a larger amount in order to support the same amount of people. Therefore, more financial stress is put on donating families. Now, if we don't get rid of taxes, there's a whole lot less financial stress on everyone, and therefore the likelihood of taxes driving people into poverty is much lower. Not to mention the fact that you are also taxing the rich, and regardless of the financial situation of the country there are always rich people to be taxed. Even during the great depression, there was a booming upper class. So, you people seem to have a lot of problems with taxing individuals. But couldn't you lower taxes on individuals and raise them on corporations, who, at the moment, give the country practically nothing? What do you have against that? For that matter, without the government organizing things, how are you going to spend those donations? The government, if nothing else, keeps things well organized. If you created groups to sort out donations and give them to the right people you'd need a lot of volunteers. And people tend to have lives, so you're likely not going to get that many people who want to work for free. What then? Not to mention things like healthcare. How are these organizations going to organize healthcare deals with large corporations? And here's my favorite point. In how many situations have these libertarian ideals worked? How many countries out there have implemented this successfully? Most of the other developed countries out there are downright socialist compared to us. I mean, libertarian ideas work great in theory, but hey, so did communism.