From: mvij@ocf.berkeley.edu (Manish Vij)
Newsgroups: alt.culture.us.asian-indian,alt.individualism
Subject: Re: = Opportunity etc.
Date: 7 Jan 1993 09:02:39 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley Open Computing Facility
NNTP-Posting-Host: earthquake.berkeley.edu

In article <ARCHER.627.726336611@utkvm1.utk.edu> ARCHER@utkvm1.utk.edu (T. Archer) writes:
>Unrelated:  participation in the Salvation Army is voluntary.  Participation 
>in a state-mandated "war on poverty" is manadory, coercive, and immoral.

The first issue is whether to help anyone else, assuming they're responsible
for their own successes, as all ultimately are.  The second is whether
to coerce such aid by funding anti-poverty programs through taxes.

If you truly wouldn't even part with your fecal matter for anyone else's
sake, you wouldn't really get along in a family.  Aside from altruistic
reasons, mutual aid and cooperation eventually in a selfish sense benefits
those who participate.  My philosophy is to extend that family concept from
the nuclear family to human beings in general.  I may not practice it all
the time, but it is an ideal I admire.

As for the second issue, consider:

1) Taxation can marshal enormous resources to take care of a problem.
2) The portion of taxation which currently goes to welfare etc. is miniscule
   compared to the so-called valid portion which goes to defense and other
   tasks which federal gov't is well-adapted to.
3) It is not at all clear that voluntary charity alone takes care of
   suffering; it does not now, in the current social-justice-influenced
   system, and abuses of capitalism show everywhere, especially in
   developing nations.

Again, if the belief is that "If they don't succeed on their own, f*ck 'em,"
I disagree sharply for both the above reasons and the following example:
without managed trade, we would have much weaker domestic auto and 
chipmaking industries.  This is just an extension of the isolationist
argument, but applied to business rather than individuals.

Sure; I was just taking the example of starvation.

[Of Nicaragua:]
>As I recall, the revolution there took property from those who legally owned 
>it without compensating them, and gave it to those who did not.  That is 
>theft.

There are sometimes higher values than upholding the law.  Otherwise, for
example, the American Revolution was composed of merely law-breaking
riff-raff.  In my view, when an extreme polarization of wealth is
achieved in a society and poverty becomes unbearable and widespread, 
overthrow of the ruling class is perfectly justified.

>No one has claimed that the invisible hand is benevolent, only omnipotent.  
>Anytime you try to dink with the laws of supply and demand, you cause more 
>problems than you solve.

It is clumsy to "dink" with market forces, granted.  Farm subsidies, I'll
give you, have caused problems.  The minimum wage, however, is better for
our economy than the harms it causes.  Other examples abound.

>>We can strike a balance between suffocating overregulation and the cruelty of
>>the free market.
>>
>
>Not really.

You've been living far too long under Republican administrations :-).

>Vote Dempublican, it's easier than thinking.

Vote Green; at least there's some thought-provoking arguments.

Manish
-- 
She paints herself that bird, a thrush
with crimson stain across her mouth
No raspberry, a hot-sweet flush
denies the fever frocking south.         - S.K.S.