From: thomasr@cpqhou.compaq.com (Thomas Rush)
Subject: Re: The end of the Reagan Era
Reply-To: thomasr@cpqhou.compaq.com (Thomas Rush)
Organization: Compaq Computer Corporation
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 92 17:44:49 GMT

Oh, what a tangled web of attributions.  I'll try to shorten
this response without killing sources.

In article <1992Nov6.134927.26640@mksol.dseg.ti.com> mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539) writes:
>In <1992Nov05.230556.24041@watson.ibm.com> johniac@austin.ibm.com (John Iacoletti/100000) writes:
>
>>The government doesn't use gas tax money to do anything about air 
>>pollution.  
>
>What the government currently does is irrelevant to a discussion of
>tax policy as a corrective action insofar as full costing goes.  The
>government makes no effort to impose full costing via tax policy.
>However, last time I checked the discussion was over hypothetical
>changes, not over what we're doing now.

Use a mirror, Fred.  "What the government currently does is
irrelevant to a discussion of social policy as a corrective action
insofar as full retirement benefits goes."

But you argure that we can't scrap SS, because "it's there."  Sigh.

>>Are you talking about road maintenance?  
>
>In part.  Also about impacts on other economic choices from land use
>for highways and roadways, the cost of injuries and deaths caused by
>automobiles to society, the impact (cost) to others when one more
>person elects to use roadways during a peak use period, and a number
>of other things.  This isn't a great dark mystery.  The thing I find
>funniest is that libertarians almost inevitably don't really
>understand the concept because their whole philosophy ASSUMES that the
>market is already imposing full costs on consumers.  If it doesn't,
>then the market doesn't work in the nice perfect manner that it must
>in order for libertarian claims about "free market forces" to work;
>and unfortunately, the market DOESN'T impose such costs.  Hence
>consumers make non-optimal choices on allocation of economic
>resources, buying 'too much' of one thing and 'not enough' of another.

What _I_ find funny is that you don't seem to understand libertarian
positions, yet you have the nerve to tell us what we believe and
what we understand.  That and the fact that you are arguing against
some mythical group you have constructed and filed under the name
"libertarians," (which coincidently happens to be the name of a
political party in this country) instead of discussing the issues
real people are raising.

To clear this up for you, the Libetarian Party believes that the
initiation of force (either overtly or by fraud) is wrong.  We
beilive that government interference in free markets, including tax
policy, incentives, and regulation, are illegitimate uses of
government authority.  It is because of those interferences that
the current markets represent anything _but_ free markets.

>Oh, one thing of note is that absolutely full costing is just about as
>impossible to do as the 'perfect markets' that libertarians assume.
>It is, however, an attempt to move in the right direction.  Hey,
>nothing's perfect; not even a perfect stranger.

We do not assume that today's markets are perfect markets.  If we
did, we would be fighting to keep things just as they are.
Instead, we know that the federal government, in particular, has
created wildly _un_free markets, and we wish to eliminate that
interference, while you seem to think that the same government that
has screwed things up this well can straighten them out with just a
little more regulation.


thomas rush				thomasr@cpqhou.compaq.com
compaq computer corporation		their employee,
deep in the hearth of texas		not their opinions.
Newsgroups: alt.politics.elections,talk.politics.misc,alt.fan.dan-quayle,alt.rush-limbaugh