From: crosmun@crosmun.rtp.dg.com (William Crosmun)
Subject: Re: [misc.activism.progressive] Clinton Office Requests Comments
Date: Thu, 7 Jan 93 16:36:26 GMT
Distribution: inet
Organization: Data General Corporation, Research Triangle Park, NC

In article <1ifucoINN3nh@armory.centerline.com> mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben) writes:
>In article <5JAN199316484012@ariel.lerc.nasa.gov> secsu@ariel.lerc.nasa.gov (Ralph O. Clark) writes:
>>In article <1ic9pvINNt8@armory.centerline.com>, mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben) writes...
>>[Huben argues that a large middle class inherently depends on goverment
>> subsidies for its existence.]
>>
>>>Yes, but that large middle class was a product of pre-industrial government
>>>subsidy: ever hear of the Homestead Act?  And its long list of predecessors?
>>>And state agricultural research?  That large middle class consisted primarily
>>>of farmers until the major migrations to the cities that engendered massive
>>>public education.  Giving small allotments of farmland away for free is a
>>>subsidy that has seldom been replicated.
>>
>>1) The Homestead Act was just a formalization of the process by which this
>>country was settled: arrive, stake out claim, clear land, build house and
>>defensive structures if necessary, farm land.
>
>The Homestead Act was just one of many such acts, most of the others by
>states or colonies which LAID CLAIM to the land.  The states then doled it
>out in small parcels.  Giving away state-owned, undeveloped land is a handout.
>Compare to other nations where large properties were granted (many of which
>persist to today in Latin America), as opposed to here where most "claims"
>were limited by law to approximately what would constitute a sound family farm.

How did this "state-owned" land come to be state-owned in the first place?  Was it
not the US government, acting as agents for US citizens, using US "taxes" that
purchased/acquired this land?  If the land is owned by the American people, letting
the people have access to it is not a handout.  Educational subsidies are not the
same in that the education is not owned in common, nor is the tax money that funds
the subsidy.  The tax money that purchased land gave all Americans a stake in the
land.  The tax money that funds subsidies helps some at the expense of others.  The
large middle class may have been a consequence of everybody working together and
acting through the government, but that doesn't equal the government creating the
middle class.



===============================================================================
William Crosmun
crosmun@dg-rtp.dg.com

===============================================================================
"Above all, as the keynote of all Democratic policy, in passing upon any
 question, let the controlling aim and ambition be to keep the road open for
 private enterprise and personal initiative."

             John W. Davis - Democratic candidate for President - 1924

===============================================================================
"I do not want to live under a philanthropy.  I do not want to be taken care
 of by the government.... We do not want a benevolent government.  We want a
 free and a just government."

             Woodrow Wilson  

===============================================================================

>
>Mike Huben
>
>"To save the world requires faith and courage: faith in reason, and courage
>to proclaim what reason shows to be true."
>	Bertrand Russell in "The Prospects of Industrial Civilization".