No, you claimed that you were being force fed the benefits of society, and expected to pay for them. How terrible that the government doesn’t let people drag you off to slavery, keeps your home from being burned down, prevents plagues and famine from sweeping the country and killing you, and so on - what a terrible burden for you. :rolleyes:
Over and over again, all over the world we see the same pattern; when government collapses, society collapses. Simply from living in a society that is not filled with chaos and mass death, you benefit from the government. Government is necessary. And by living whereever you are, you benefit from it, and owe it. Call it rent, if the word taxes freaks you out so much.
Not if the government is not involved in research; then the important factor is “profit”, not “need”. You want an AIDS vaccine or a cure ? Then support government and not corporate research; corporations make more money selling drugs to a person for a lifetime than they would for a one time vaccine or cure, therefore they will never invent one; some corporations have even admitted that they have no interest in looking for a vaccine.
And where do you think corporations get a lot of the basic research they base their applied research on ? The government. Corporations have no interest in anything that might pay off in twenty or fifty years.
It makes me feel that for the first and possibly last time in the history of this administration, a substantial amount of tax money is going to a good cause.
Out of curiosity, how is it that you told us in your Great Debates thread that you were too busy to post today, but now here you are spewing new lies and insults in a pit thread?
Makes sense to me… if the general welfare clause means the federal government can do anything it wants, why did the framers list specific powers granted to the government in Article I Section 8?
This may be news to you, but we have a *limited * government. Do you know what *limited * means? Article I Section 8 in our federal Constitution lists specific powers and duties reserved for the federal government. The federal government is *not * allowed to do anything *not * on the list. Anything *not * on the list - such as education and medical research - must be handled by the states. See the 10th Amendment for more details.
Yes, that is correct. If New Hampshire’s state government wants to fund $30B in medical research, all the power to it.
It really unnerves me that people have no concept of a limited federal government. They think that the federal government is allowed to do anything. They also think that, as long as a program helps people, we shouldn’t care whether or not the program is constitutional.
I am disgusted by people who think America isn’t worth paying for.
I am pretty sick of politicans who try to buy the votes of people who don’t think America is worth paying for by promising tax breaks.
Pay your frikking taxes and count yourself lucky, about half the world would wait in line to pay taxes to have the opportunities this country afford you.
*Had *a limited government. That train left the station a long time ago.
I suspect that some of the Founding Fathers would be shocked to see the size and scope of the federal government today, but the truth is if we needed to pass an amendment to the constitution to allow the government to fund medical research, it would fly thru Congress and be approved by the necessary states without problem. It would be nice if that process was actually followed, but nothing would change.
Does anyone know when the first federal dollars were appropriated for medical research and if anyone tried to challenge it in court? Just curious. Remember that the first time Congress tried to pass an income tax, it was overturned by the SCOTUS and an amendment was passed to allow it (16th amendment, 1913).
Bush asked for an extension to an already-existing program, and the extension won’t even kick in until he’s out of office. The $30 billion, by the way, doesn’t include research in its stated goals. Just thought a fact or two might be helpful.
Although, when one is dealing with people who resent taxes because they didn’t ask for rural electrification or their polio and tuberculosis vaccinations, and constitutional scholars who think federalism means that foreign aid is a matter that should be left to the individual states, facts may well be unwelcome.
Except that that wouldn’t work. Many women are infected by husbands who sleep with prostitutes; so you can hardly fault the women. Also, a major route of transmission is from mother to her unborn child–according to Wiki, that accounts for about 630,000 additional cases per year. Those goddamned fetuses–refusing to practice abstinence! They’ve got what’s coming to them.
I have no more obligation to a sometimes beneficial entity which would act without my cooperation than I have an obligation to the bat that eats mosquitoes or the light from my neighbor that falls on my land.
Universities are centers of research as well. Private donations to these research centers could lead to cures.
You seem to mistake me for an anarchist. I am not. I am in favor of the opt-in opt-out government. If I were free to live on my property and not pay taxes or benefit from government and not be jailed, I would consider the American government one of the best in the world and would gladly choose to be a citizen. But I am given no option of cooperation by the mere circumstance of my location, and am thus coerced.
Since this thread is already hopelessly hijacked–it seems this focus on coercion focuses too strictly on negative liberty–that is, freedom from coercion. But negative freedom is meaningless without positive liberty–the ability to actually do something with your negative liberty. If you have negative liberty to go to the doctor, but have no money to pay for treatment, your negative liberty in this respect is pretty worthless. I agree that the function of government is to secure liberty for me, but I differ from the libertarian in thinking that negative liberty is not worthwhile if one’s positive liberty is severely restricted by circumstance. Thus, some must sacrifice some negative liberty in order to ensure positive liberty for all. And of course, if people were allowed to opt out of government, the people who would most readily do so are the people who have sufficient means to guarantee their positive freedoms–leaving the rest with only negative freedom.
It was a paraphrase. I reversed Ben Franklin’s dictum to make a point I believe relevant to this thread, namely that liberty and security are both equally important and equally valuable, and that for the past 6000 years human civilization has been essentially a series of attempts to balance the two.
No civilized society agrees with you; if they did, they would cease to be civilized, and fairly soon just cease to be at all.
Yeah, right. :rolleyes: And if they don’t ? One of the more disgusting parts of libertarianism is it’s Social Darwinism.
First, what say you want is impossible. As I said, you benefit simply by being here; what you are actually asking for is to benefit without being paying, while pretending to be a rugged individualist instead of a parasite. Second, anarchy under another name is still anarchy; as somebody once said, libertarianism is the anarchy of the right.
They are actually one and the same. Jesus is Himself charitable and calls upon other men to be, but does not force them to be against their will. And for now, we can set aside our disagreement about how effective government support is or can be. Its meddling has crippled as many ventures as it has helped. Samuel Broder, a former researcher at the National Institutes of Health and a former director at the National Cancer Institute has said, “If it were up to the NIH to cure Polio through a centrally directed program, you’d have the best iron lung in the world but not a polio vaccine.”