It’s a rare occasion that I find myself in complete agreement with Der Trihs. My general response to ForumBot is “tough shit.” If you genuinely don’t want to live in a society with a government then move to the Alaskan wilderness, stop using roads, stop buying or using any goods that are transported on publicly built roadways, never ask for any police or law enforcement help whatsoever, make arrangements to only use private ambulances (although finding one that won’t use a public road to get to you will be difficult) and you still would be a parasite.
Just by living here, even if you live out in the wilderness and hunt and farm all your own food and never use any public services or buy any goods at all that have been brought to you by the massive transportation infrastructure you’re still a parasite because roving bands of armed brigands don’t exist in this country because we have an established government with military authority.
Back when large parts of the world weren’t under the authority of the government, the only rights you had were the ones you could defend, and on any given day a marauding band of raiders or brigands could burn down your house, rape your wife, kill you, and enslave your children. (If you don’t think this is a realistic scenario look at the kind of stuff that goes on in the Sudan, the exact scenario mentioned happens there regularly.)
Your cute little desire to be able to cherry pick what benefits of government you receive and thus reduce your tax burden is childish, stupid, and unrealistic. If government could only tax you for the services you felt you directly needed we’d have tons of people who would opt out of having fire departments, public schools, universities, and et cetera. Basically we wouldn’t have a society. Just because you don’t have kids doesn’t mean you don’t benefit directly from an educated public. Just because you don’t have AIDS or some other disease doesn’t mean you do not benefit indirectly from research into curing them. Just because you don’t use Medicare or Medicaid does not mean you don’t benefit from living in a society in which they exist. So that’s why you don’t get a choice, because your choice is antisocial and wrong. The oceans are more or less unclaimed, buy a boat and live off the sea if you have a genuine desire to be independent. Because no matter what services you avail yourself of, just by living here you receive the benefits of government and thus your desire to opt-out of the services you don’t feel you need has no place here.
Without hijacking this thread any further, that is what I find distasteful about modern Libertarian Christianity. You are eager to receive salvation, but good works are optional. Don’t bother quoting the heretic Saul of Tarsus either; Christianity has been going downhill ever since he perverted it.
I really don’t see how leaving it to the free market would work (in this particular instance). Why would private enterprises feel the need to come up with an AIDS vaccine? The vast majority of people that have it aren’t exactly in the best position to buy it. I imagine it’s pretty far down the list of any private research.
I don’t know where you get your information on who can afford what, and I don’t know whether you’re combining “private enterprise” and private charity into one big pot (which would destroy your premise, in my opinion). But I do know that the cite Fear linked me to says that the biggest problem has been awareness. And it said nothing about the disease affecting only people of limited means. It is a disease that comes in many forms and degrees of severity, and happens to inflict more women than men. The sheer generosity of Americans —especially people of faith — for charity is legendary and well documented. As they’re made more and more aware of the problem, I would expect them to come through. At the very least, I trust them as much as or more than I trust the politicians in charge of distributing conscripted dollars. Many of them lied, cheated, and blew smoke up our asses just to get their jobs. Why would they magically become good Samaritans once they have the power they craved?
Then the world didn’t want a vaccine badly enough. What’s to stop you from starting your own drug research company? You could make a lot of money off of a vaccine.
Canada and Mexico have the benefit of the knowledge that so long as the United States is here and has the world’s most powerful military, they will never be invaded. Our mere presence ensures the entire continent of North America will not be attacked by a foreign nation. Do those nations then owe us a tribute? After all, they’re benefiting from us and not paying taxes.
My air is cleaner by Georgia’s pollution regulation. Should I pay a small part of Georgia’s tax, since I benefit? If I put out a fire that is threatening my home, do I have the right to charge you for the service since it would have spread to your land anyway?
Absolutely not.
All of this is predicated on some sort of belief you mistake me having of a pay-as-you-go government. No, I propose an all-or-nothing form of government that will recognize property ownership is not mere rent to the state. In other words, I want an end to governments that are defined by borders and more by the consent of the governed. I know you feel like you won some sort of battle by giving me beliefs I don’t have and then attacking them, but please actually listen to the specific positions I am advocating and not just the ones you think I probably have.
No you can’t. In my wife’s case, there are only 150,000 systemic scleroderma patients in the country. Not even the most altruistic drug company could make money off of that patient base. Your politics condemn her to death. Given that alternative, any ethical compromise I make by picking your pocket is a small price to pay. Just as you have little regard for her health, I have little regard for your property. Since you have concluded the best society is every man for himself, I would be a fool not to.
I am not intimately familiar with NAFTA, so I’m sorry if these questions are a bit ignorant. Does part of the agreement (that’s a very important word) include a tribute to America for the great military power? Or is it just an economic alliance? I think it’s the latter.
I have not. I have concluded that an individual should have the right to live his life free from the coercion of others and to be able to choose to give up some liberty for security. I would choose this, and I expect the overwhelming majority would make this same choice. I argue this choice does not exist at present date because of the way we recognize the legitimacy of governing bodies.
The really sad thing is that you truly believe this. Or rather, the sad thing is that you lack the ability to see the difference between the government fulfilling it’s proper role to provide for the common defense and stealing from it’s citizens to fund anything and everything that some lobbying group has managed to sell as (here come the four scariest words in government)“for the common good”.
Maybe, but Jonas Salk, who developed the vaccine, got his undergraduate degree from the City College of New York, a government institution, and Albert Sabin, who developed the oral vaccine, did so at the University of Cincinatti, a government institution. and it was tested and spread by the World Health Organization, a multi-governmental institution.
Well, the world has a long history of people who weren’t the least bit grateful to the nation that was keeping them safe from invasion by foreign powers. There was a conspicuous instance of this in, oh, round about 1776 IIRC.
I have not yet finished reading the thread, but I feel compelled to comment here and now based on the apparent presumption of Crafter Man and seemingly echoed by you, Indistinguishable, that AIDS is purely a sexually transmitted disease.
The last statistics I saw, 3.5% of AIDS sufferers in sub-Saharan Africa were children who got it congenitally from their AIDS-afflicted mothers. A further 1.5% were children who contracted it before being weaned through their mothers’ milk. A large but not numerically defined segment are women who caught it from their husbands, cultural context implying that the women but not the men were to remain chaste in terms of no sex except with their spouse.
So, the 3.5% are to abstain from being born? The 1.5% are to abstain from nursing? The other group are to abstain from sex within marriage, even when their husbands compel it?
I can tolerate some self-righteousness without protest. But this little gem of reducing the cure for AIDS to abstinence and let the sufferers die with no effort towards a cure.
I know a man dying of AIDS now. He contracted it from his first lover, at age 19, in 1985. He survived by intense will to live, an amazingly resilient though horribly abused immune system, the “AIDS cocktail” when it was developed and refined, and a determination to use his tragic fortune to do good for others. For over 20 years his sole sex partner has been his own right hand. What he’s devoted his life to, by and large, has been being an AIDS community educator, warning people of the dangers and how you can contract the disease. His body finally ran into a couple of viruses it could not fight off, and he’s been in decline since then, slowly losing his vision to cytomegalovirus and with a brain tumor affecting his mental processes adversely. I grieve deeply at the prospect of losing him, his friendship and the wonderful work he’s done with people who badly needed what he had to give. And if you two chill out with the judgmentalism and instead do volunteer work with people who need it and support yourself by menial work while doing so for the next two decades, you might possibly bring yourselves up to the standard he set for what it means to really be a good human being.
Heh. Most of us had already come to that conclusion simply from the fact you started this thread.
Indistinguishable, my sincere apologies. I mistook the intent of the post I quoted as being “straight” – Somebody’s Law at work again, of course. :smack:
There aren’t enough roll eye smileys in the world, I feel I depicted your beliefs most accurately. You feel like you own your property and that you have a right to live your life “separate” from the government. Basically, you feel that people should be allowed to create conclaves of anarchy as long as they own the land.
Well, sorry, that just doesn’t fly. And since this is the pit, I’ll come out and say it’s just plain stupid, and you’re stupid for thinking that.
How exactly would these people who have decided to “opt out” from being governed by America be dealt with? Would you have to get a passport, and go through customs every time you left your yard, as you were leaving the “Ungoverned Autonomous Property of ForumBot” and entering the United States? Would these people who have “opted out” of being governed by the U.S. government be allowed to opt back in? Once they opt back in, should they be able to start sending their kids to school without having to pay back taxes?
Should they, while they’ve “opted out of being governed” be allowed to reap the benefits of said government that they refuse to be governed by and refuse to fund? ie, should you be allowed to travel on our roads, and interact in our economy which you cannot separate from our government (and I say that as one of the strongest free market advocates on this message board)?
Everything you’d see for sale at a store would have been transported over the interstate highway system, built and funded by taxes you’re refusing to pay. Would you be willing to forego buying any consumer goods, or would you be okay with buying them, as long as you didn’t have to pay sales tax on them?
Then come up with a better system. The one you’ve talked about in this thread is not only unspeakably stupid, it is completely unfeasible.
Governments exist as an organized way of controlling the sovereignty and interests of a society, societies have long decided that the best way to manage their own affairs is to have a given area that is “their sovereign territory.” Recognized as such by other states.
There’s definitely of course, nomadic groups and there have been throughout history. However even in the context of nomadic groups or earlier hunter-gatherer tribes we can assume there was this concept of “societally owned areas.” We can assume this because animals of all type exhibit this sort of behavior, wolf packs stake out a territory that is more or less theirs, and they don’t share it. They may not have a system of government or clearly defined political borders, but they have an area that is “theirs” as a society of wolves and they will defend it from intruders.
Humans are by their nature social animals, primates tend to be social creatures, gorillas, bonobos, most types of monkey I’m aware of, all are very social creatures.
As we’ve evolved and developed civilization, human social groups established what we today call “societies.” Eventually a need arose to govern these societies, it probably started with informal rules (don’t take food that isn’t yours, don’t kill someone for no reason etc) and eventually formalized into legal systems. The fact that there are many human societies meant you had areas where different societies might overlap and different rulesets would clash. The way humans naturally have dealt with this is by defining certain territory as belonging to one given society and in that territory, the “rules” of that society apply.
Other societies over time accepted and recognized the territory of other societies because societies would defend these territories (thus we have wars to determine which society gets to govern said territory.) One of the fundamental features of a territory being part of society X is that the laws/rules/regulations of said society apply there. Yes, you’re right that because of the way we define government legitimacy there’s no way for your batshit insane, unspeakably stupid ideas to be implemented. It’s also because there’s no realistic way to separate a given patch of territory from the governing society that claims it as its own simply because of the right of property ownership.
Property ownership as a right cannot exist without governments. With no government whatsoever, the only right you would have to property would be your ability to defend it from whoever wants to take it. Realistically that means you don’t have any property rights. One of the reasons governments are entrusted with authority is to defend property ownership, or the desire to be safe in your property, something people cannot do as individuals in the long term.
Why should some moron in Alabama named ForumBot be able to absent himself from being governed by the United States? Sure, the U.S. may recognize his ownership of the land but he can only own said land because the government of the U.S. systematically conquered and took it from the people who use to own it. And your existence on that land is only feasible with all the modern conveniences because of things like the interstate highway system, new technology driven by public elementary education and university education, and et cetera.
The United States has every right to claiming your personal plot of land as part of its territory it fought wars to claim and keep that territory. Within the legal system of the United States, you have a right to own that patch of land as your personal property, but it’s ludicrous and unimaginable that someone thinks that right extends to you being able to say that not only do you own the property rights to the land, you also should be able to make it no longer part of the territory of the United States.
Even you admit you wouldn’t buy into such a thing if the option were there, and the fact is, probably less than 1% of all people would. Because that would mean you have to have a passport to go to the grocery store, and shit, if you were living in an autonomous territory within the United States, what would stop me from driving across the border, killing you, and taking all your stuff? I would’ve committed no crime since I was operating in an area that wasn’t part of the United States or any other society and was not under the authority of any government (unless you established your own government–which would be unable to do anything about it since I’d just killed its only employee.)
