From: fcrary@ucsu.Colorado.EDU (Frank Crary)
Subject: Re: VOTE, BABY, VOTE!
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 01:22:25 GMT

In article <BZS.92Nov8151938@ussr.std.com> bzs@ussr.std.com (Barry Shein) writes:
>>The majority of people who are rich got that way through hard work and plain 
>>old smarts.  I think everybody aspires to be rich.  The notion of becoming
>>wealthy is what separates capitalism from socialism.  To take your argument
>>one step further, why not just decree that no one can make more than a
>>million dollars.  Who the hell could possibly need more than a million dollars?
>Reductio ad absurdum, straw-man argument.

Hardly: He hasn't made "if they can afford it, they deserve to be taxed"
logic any more extreme than it already is. If that is a valid justification
to tax the rich, why isn't it also a valid reason to conficate most
of their property?

>The country is in trouble, thanks to the Reagan/Bush "put it on the
>credit card" excesses.

That odd: The Constitution says _Congress_ controls all spending and
taxes. I don't recall this having been repealed. Perhaps we are
in trouble, thanks to the liberal, Democratic Congress' "put it on
credit" excesses.

>The wealthy industrialists benefitted most from
>their policies, if for no other reason than it made and kept them
>wealthy (that's self-evident)

This could be said of _any_ policy that allowed the poor and 
middle class to become rich. Nor did government _spending_
contribute to the welfare of the rich (government _policies_
may have, but with a few notable exceptions, such as the
Savings and Loan white-collar crime, it wasn't government
spending.)

>...it's not absurd to now ask them to help
>solve the resultant problems before they're dragged down by the
>effects of the deficit even more than the average person...

It might be clear, if you could conclusively and factually connect
the well-being of the rich during the 1980s to deficit spending.
Social programs benefiting the poor were certainly a cause of
defecit spending in the 1980s. With equal validity you could 
blame the poor for our current economic crisis. (I, personally,
wouldn't: However we got into this mess, we're all in it together
and should be trying, on an equal basis, to solve the problem;
instead, it seems to be politically popular to point fingers and
to try to get someone _else_ to foot the bill.)

>No one is suggesting anything like you describe, I don't remember any
>such shrill protests from the defense contractors when Reagan tripled
>defense procurements. How come now they have a "right" to be left
>alone? They certainly didn't want to be left alone when they were
>sucking down those billions of dollars we were putting on the cuff.

Defence contractors don't, as a rule, pocket the money the
government gives them. They are _required_ to waste it themselves,
on excessive testing, inefficient organizational arangements, 
and lawyers to keep up with all the regulations. That's waste
not graft. By the way, they have a right to be left alone because
_everyone_ has a right to be left alone (or at least treated 
equally by the government.)

                                         Frank Crary
                                         CU Boulder
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton