From: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU (Speaker-to-Minerals)
Subject: Re: libertarianism
Reply-To: lydick@SOL1.GPS.CALTECH.EDU
Organization: HST Wide Field/Planetary Camera
Distribution: alt
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1992 07:14:10 GMT

In article <Bu8Cx3.AFE@well.sf.ca.us>, dasher@well.sf.ca.us (D Anton Sherwood) writes:
>"There's a confusion of means with ends.  If helping the poor is good, then
>naive people think a Federal Bureau of Helping the Poor must be good,
>and anyone who advocates abolishing it is a Scrooge.  And Scrooge's
>protestations that the Bureau is actually _harming_ the poor are dismissed
>as self-serving lies.

Agreed.  Just because a particular goal is worth pursuing doesn't mean that
it's worth setting up a government institution to purportedly pursue that goal.

>"In fact, private charities do a much better job.  If the United Way, say,
>paid as much of its budget to its own employees as the various Bureaux of
>Demonstrating Concern for the Problem pay to theirs, it would be prosecuted
>for fraud.  While the Federal Emergency Management Agency is `assessing the
>situation', the Red Cross and a rainbow of ad-hoc committees are saying
>`Will FEMA please get out of the way so I can pass out these blankets?'.

Actually, I've got a simple rule of thumb regarding charities:  I will NOT
contribute to ANY "charity" that pays any of its employees more than I make. 
In effect, that means that I won't contribute to ANY organized charity.  I
WILL, however, contribute to particular programs (e.g., research that I think
will be beneficial in the long-run) or to particular individuals (e.g., one
homeless person I run into from time to time).  But why should *I* give of my
income in order to support a "charity" that pays its administrator twice what I
make in a year?

>"Here's what croggles me.  It is widely believed that most people are no
>damn good.  Yet the no-goods, in the privacy of a voting booth, are somehow
>trusted to do good.  Similarly, we are not competent to run our own lives,
>yet we are competent to choose representatives to run our neighbors' lives.
>Meanwhile, most people seem to agree that politicians rank somewhere near
>shell-game hustlers on the ethical scale.  Yet they keep urging that these
>paragons of something which is not necessarily virtue take more power to
>control the activities of others.  I don't get it.

A similar problem crops up as follows (I'm citing a specific case;  this
shouldn't be taken as representative of ALL cases, but it does demonstrate that
the problem exists).  There was this fellow named, for the sake of this
discussion, Jeff Mattus.  He was schizophrenic (complete with hearing voices; 
If you happened to be in the same room with him and heard him apparently
talking on the phone to someone, there was a good chance that the phone would
ring during his converstation).  He was on welfare.  He received foodstamps. 
He was supposed to be on workfare (where you get assigned to do some simple
work for the government in exchange for the money they're giving you); however,
after one day of using a hoe, he claimed that it had caused a repetitive motion
injury, and the doofuses at the state welfare agency chose not to dispute it. 
Never mind that a repetitive motion injury typically take on the order of
months to develop).  This guy really deserved to be put in a mental
institution.  He was definitely mentally ill, with a well-known syndrome.  Yet
this guy, who heard Michael Jackson talking to him 24 hours a day, who was
unwilling to wield a hoe for four hours a day to support himself, who received
food stamps because his income was so low (he wasn't willing to to ANY work
unless he was hired as an electrical engineer, a job for which he was NOT
qualified) got to live at public expense, AND to vote.  The state said,
basically:
	1)  This guy's not playing with a full deck, so we've got to support him
and
	2)  This guy's qualified to help decide public policy
Now, some of us see a bit of a problem with espousing both 1) and 2)
simultaneously.  Of course, those with a more socialist point of view claim
that people like me, who say that someone incompetent enough that I have to
support him is too incompetent to be allowed to vote, are social Darwinists and
evil.  I say that people who take that attitude are stupid and unfit for
survival.
Organization: Sophomore, Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA