From: pas@kepler.unh.edu (Paul A Sand)
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton,alt.politics.democrats.d,alt.politics.elections,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: VOTE, BABY, VOTE!
Followup-To: talk.politics.misc
Date: 13 Nov 1992 10:34:11 GMT
Organization: University of New Hampshire
NNTP-Posting-Host: kepler.unh.edu
Summary: followups set to talk.politics.misc

nj: Nick Jovanovic

nj: Why do you think that someone's money belongs completely to them?
    This is the incorrect basis of all your arguments. Money only has
    value in a society; one can only accumulate money by interacting
    with other people. Therefore, the system (government) which allows
    you to interact, which helps you to enforce your contracts, which
    helps makes you physically safe, which helps you interact more
    efficiently (infrastructure), and therefore which fundamentally
    helped you accumulate the money has legitimate claim to a
    significant portion of your money (taxes). And, BTW, the more money
    one accumulates, the more one has taken advantage of this system,
    therefore it follows that more taxes would be levied on him (or
    her).

Humans are social critters by nature. Paying the state because it
`allows you to interact' is rather like paying the Physics Department
for gravity. (Unfortunately, physicists don't seem to have the
necessary chutzpah to have pulled this off successfully. With the
state, apparently, it's a different story.)

The specific services mentioned above (infrastructure, contract
enforcement, etc.) would surely be more sensibly, not to mention
equitably, funded by simple user fees, not the strained logic that says
`you got more, so you (uuuhhhh) musta used more services although
(uuuhhh) we didn't really keep track, so you hafta pay more.' But
methinks sense and equity are not the uppermost factors in the minds of
apologists for big government.

nj: Also, poor people deserve to be compensated for their contribution
    to helping someone else accumulate money. Having lots of poor people
    around keeps wages low, since the supply of labor is abundant. Even
    with very progressive tax rate structures, rich people remain rich
    after taxes; it is very much in their self-interest to maintain
    decent conditions for these poor people so that revolutionary,
    criminal, and disease forces are kept in check and, thus, also the
    status quo which made the rich able to be rich.

Nonsense. *Utter* nonsense. Historically, the compensation to the
`poor' for participating in the market economy was, simply, to make
them non-poor.  (Not a bad deal for them, and a far more effective
defense against revolution, etc.) The `poor people' we have today are
noted for their non-participation in the job market; I doubt whether
any hard evidence could be mustered to demonstrate their downward
pressure on wages. Nor is our current welfare state doing such a hot
job of keeping the `poor' healthy and non-criminal.
-- 
-- Paul A. Sand           | I have no faith that the obvious pointlessness
-- Univ. of New Hampshire | of some program is any effective deterrent to a
-- pas@kepler.unh.edu     | government's tendency to pursue it.
			  |     (Alan S. Watt, comp.org.eff.talk)