Lib, can you tell us with a straight face you do not apply for any government benefits, will turn down Social Security, and will never vote? If you do any of those things, you are choosing your green beans and tofu, just the same as those of us asking for a particular focus in government spending.
If you don’t play the rackateer’s game, he’ll make your life, and possibly your family’s, a living hell, so I kiss his ass and pay him his taxes, but I tell the other merchants that he is a tyrant.
Besides, do you mean to tell me that even the Social Security that I’ve paid isn’t mine? I thought it was a trust fund for me.
Divorced of nogginhead’s snarkiness, though, Lib, he asks a valid question: what is the role a person of libertarian principles – yourself, for example – in the political process of a nation predominantly not practicing libertarian theory, other than the obvious advocacy of a conversion of the hearts and minds of that nation’s people to libertarian theory? (BTW, and as a sidelight: there’s an ends/means question there – what would be your stance on a hypothetical group of libertarian radicals gaining control of the government and mandating that it be run on libertarian principles? Sounds coercive to me at first impression, but you may view it in a different light.)
As for Social Security, if you examine closely the law under which it is levied, administered, and distributed, it is nothing more or less than a tax, paid into a particular fund, which then disburses pensions to elderly and disabled persons. It is not structured as a government-run retirement program or an on-terms purchase of an annuity from the government, but as a combination of a tax and a doling out of government benefits where the former supports the latter. It would be completely within the legal bounds of Congressional power (though probably political suicide) for them to declare tomorrow that all Social Security funds will now go to pay down the national debt, or to support the war on Iraq, or to build new government buildings in the districts of the ten senior Congressmen, and that no further benefits will be paid out whatsoever.
I gather that you never vote? Because that’s the exact equivalent of choosing how your money gets spent.
I agree that our political environment is a lousy host. The choice between the lesser of two evils (or, for you optimists, the greater of two insects) is truly appalling. But I belive if you don’t vote, you have less standing to complain about which dinner gets chosen for you.
Because to play my analogy out perhaps a little too far, you’re starving and I will serve you either the tofu or the green beans (my choice) and you’re hungry enough that you’ll eat whatever I give.
Maybe tofu (bombing Iraq) gives you gas and you could avoid it by just facing the facts that you’ve got to choose a or b.
I don’t see how refusing to acknowledge your ability to make the choice, ** in the real world**, is “acknowledging reality”. Can you elaborate on this point?
Lib, my only point is that if it’s a pragmatic decision on your part to participate in our government in some details of their use of your money, why then is it “morally unsound” to give your opinion on different details of their use of your money? It’s a bit like saying to the “racketeer” (who has to open his books to the people whose money he’s “extorted” and has to be elected by those same people) “…as long as you’re going to spend my money, I’d rather you concentrated it on matters I care about”.
Poly wrote:
Other than passionately pleading on behalf of peaceful honest people and presenting logical arguments in favor of the Noncoercion Principle, my role is to live my own life as libertarianly as I am allowed and to set an example for others. If I want someone to know what volunteerism is all about, for example, I might appear when they least expect it and give them the means to solve their problems when government has failed them.
But I’m not dodging that. You just don’t like my preference.
My preference is that the extortioner spend his loot by returning it to those he took it from. Then they can spend it on matters they care about.
You have a dollar. The racketeer charges you 35 cents to spend 65 cents for you. That’s crazy. Open books or not.
Yes, but do you have a second preference? If your first preference is not attained, are you genuinely indifferent as between the other options? To express a second, third or fourth preference does not in any way weaken your first preference, as we who live in democracies which practice proportional represenation through the single transferable vote know.
The problem is that you have to go waaaaaaaay down the tree before I can resign myself to letting a kidnapper keep his ransom. My first choice is to return the money. My second choice is to stop the mugging. My third choice is to establish a government that doesn’t engage in racketeering. And on it goes.
Hell, I’d rather they would just take whatever they’re going to take so they can be important and ride in limousines, and then leave me with the 65 cents. I’d rather just be robbed and left alone than have to endure the bizarre scenario of helping the robber, after his deed, decide what’s the best way he can spend his take.
Yes, but all your preferred options - not being taxed, having your tax returned, not being pestered about what should be done with the tax if it is not to be returned - are not in fact currently available to you. They may one day become available, and you can hope for that, campaign for that, and agitate for that. In the meantime you are in fact offered a (limited) opportunity to influence how tax revenues will be spent, and you do in fact have to decide whether to exercise that opportunity and, if so, how to exercise it. You can, I think, do this without in any way compromising any of your prior preferences.
Do I understand you to say that you do not, in fact, take this opportunity (i.e. either that you do not vote at all or that your criteria for voting take no account of the candidates’ views on the expenditure of tax revenues)? And, if so, is this because
(a) you genuinely don’t care how tax revenues are spent, or
(b) some other reason?
I vote for the purpose of doing what you’re all recommending, what little I can to push things toward change — although it’s a bit like pissing in a blizzard.
By the time you’ve strapped me down and bound and gagged me while your army surrounds me with its bayonettes, you will forgive me if the least of my concerns is wishing you would remove my blindfold so I can watch you count my money.
As far as I’m concerned, after what you’ve done, anything you touch will turn to shit. If you feed poor Apalachians, you will likely dehumanize them and make them jump through hoops for their dole. If you help AIDS victims in Africa, you will probably meddle in their politics as well and install another Saddam like you did in Iraq. And if you pay for students’ educations, there’s a good chance that you will interfere in their curriculum and dumb-down their testing until it is meaningless.
There’s a reason that a complex question is a logical fallacy.
Unfortunately, your current example is the same as total apathy. Your values apparently cause you not to care whether Iraq is attacked or not.
I’d say that makes you morally culpable for what your government does.
Your code says you can’t voice an opinion
You pay taxes, therefore you have a voice
The thieving government does something bad
You don’t say whoa
You didn’t exercise your voice to prevent a wrong.
Your code is causing wrong.
Your code is wrong.
Yes, clearly every minute of your life is hell filled with immediate fear for your person and your lucre. That’s why you have internet access and the freedom to present your views on the sdmb.
So, if the means are wrong, the ends can’t be right, eh? I respect that as a general guiding principle.
But again, let’s examine practice. Your money’s gone, and you are no longer staring the bayonets in the face. The money will be spent. You claim to have no interest in how. That’s fine. I note from another thread that you claim to believe in god. How does your religious code mesh with your libertarian code on this issue?
Nogginhead
I don’t believe in any “god”. And since you insist on doing nothing but wallowing in logical fallacy while ignoring everything I say, I’m done with you here. I’ve reopened our discussion where it belongs.
Actually, it occurs to me that another question for a libertarian (or at least this particular Libertarian) is this. Should we bomb Iraq?
Now that we’re not balancing two wrong things to do with your money, are you willing to take a stand on spending on this particular thing or not?
I think you have to stick to your code and say you don’t care. If you voice an opinion now, you’d be admitting that you have a preference about what not to spend your money on.
I hope this makes clear that you support whatever your government does. You might as well be a blind patriot-- my country right or wrong.
Or, if you’d like to have a less polite actual argument, instead of just personal invective, you could discuss it here.