From: silva@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Holly Silva)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.usa,alt.activism,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: [misc.activism.progressive] Clinton Office Requests Comments
Date: 5 Jan 1993 21:42:27 GMT
Organization: Stanford Univ. Earth Sciences
Distribution: inet
NNTP-Posting-Host: pangea.stanford.edu

In article <1ib136INN99s@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> ag167@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Don Pavlish) writes:
>In a previous article, mrh@centerline.com (Mike Huben) says:

>>	[...] We can no more see libertarian governments than
>>we can see heaven.  You sound just like a communist promising the withering
>>away of the state, or a Christian promising heavenly rule, or a cargo-cultist
>>propitiating the great silver birds.
>
>Don't look to heaven. Look back to the United States before socialism took
>over, before Great Society or the New Deal, before the income tax took
>hold... Perfect? No. Better than today? Probably...

	Not. For those were the days prior to any banking security laws,
when hard-working people could be wiped out financially in an instant, 
in ways that they'd never really understand. Those were the days of 
commonplace child labor -- when 10-year olds worked 10 hour shifts in
cotton mills and wound up as physically and mentally stunted adults, 
unable, certainly, to contribute much even in their simple society. 
Such people would be worse than useless today. Then there is also the
diptheria, whooping cough, tetnaeus, typhoid and TB that plagued the
lives of Americans prior to the development of gov't.-funded 
public health programs. The 'good-old-days' sucked.

>	Further, please detail what services
>we receive from the government that equal the value of the income
>stolen from us... and which we couldn't buy for ourselves much cheaper
>in a true free market system.
>
	That would be difficult, insofar as the services you directly
and indirectly receive from the government far outstrip what you could
have bought for yourselves in a 'true free market system'. The clean
and modern hospital you were probably born in may well have been a 
state or (as in my case) a university teaching hospital. Gov't. funded.
The vacinations you received as a child and infant were developed 
through gov't-funded research, and disbursed through gov't-funded 
vacination programs.
	You could try and make a case for your family's 'right' to procure 
such services free of gov't interference. But disease doesn't respect the
almighty dollar, and a libertarian's right to freedom from gov't 
'interference' in such matters translates into his right to risk infection
--- AND, necessarily therefore, his 'right' to be a disease vector to
all those who surround him. A citizen in our complex society doesn't, and
damn well shouldn't have such a 'right'. And it's those tax dollars
'stolen' from you which provide for us a modicum of freedom from disease.
	A similar, though less obvious argument can be made for the need
of the state in matters of education. Namely, if a society is to function
competitively in the modern world, some base level of education needs to
be maintained. Freedom from the societal burden of disease, and freedom
from the societal burden of ignorance and illiteracy are rather similar
'social goods' for which base levels are best provided for by state 
'interference'.
>
>Let's look at the issue from a different point of view: What right
>do you have to enable our government to take X's wealth and give it
>to you for your benefit?
>
>As for our middle class, check out how we're faring in this economy...
>check out who's going to get even more swamped with taxes as
>federal entitlement programs skyrocket on exponential trajectories.

	Oh, the poor, down-trodden middle class, whose rights have been
so sadly abused through the past 30 years or more!
	Stop your whining, bud. The two statements above are stock
phrases among net libertarians and are more diagnostic of bitchy narrow-
mindedness than indicative of any real hardship endured by the netusers
and their kin. My main objections to government funding of educational
'goods' kicks in when I see so much of this type of dreck on the net.
Were it not for government funding, this forum for whining would not
exist, and the delusions of total self-sufficiency which produce
libertarianism would not be near so prevalent -- because a lot of
alienated young men whose CRT tubes substitute for human interaction
would, perforce, be interacting with others -- in their (permanent,
full-time, dead-end) jobs as stock clerks and short-order cooks.

--
======================================================================
|| Holly Silva			I have nothing terribly clever to say||
|| Applied Earth Sciences	today.  You're in luck.		     ||
|| Stanford University						     ||
Newsgroups: soc.culture.usa