He’s not saying that the true cost isn’t known, he’s saying that for political reasons the mandate penalty couldn’t be sold as a tax, it’s still there, it’s just framed to call it something different. Because the word Tax gives half this country into rage-strokes.
Not in the least.
Taxes are good.
He’s also decrying transparency. Again, not that the true cost is necessarily unknown but that it’s deliberately made difficult to find the true numbers. It’s not for me to condemn, but it is worth posting the clip. It’s also worth reminding any big government advocates that the wool is deliberately pulled over the eyes of voters and taxpayers. THat if Joe Sixpack is sitting in his front room condemning government spending and waste *yet * Joe Sixpack doesn’t have the true figures to hand when asked then Joe Sixpack is not to be condemned or sneered at for not knowing the figures. That politicians make it deliberately difficult for Joe Sixpack to discover the true numbers.
Necessary evil is not the same as good.
Civilization is good. Taxes are the price I pay for civilization. Taxes are good.
Civilization is held together by the organized use of force. By making people do things they don’t want to do or refrain from doing things they’d like to do. Civilization, by definition, causes us to give up liberty for security. The danger in that is that we start thinking that the more liberty(and property) we give up, the better our civilization will be. It usually doesn’t work that way. A few thousand years of human history have shown that government is best when it’s the minimum necessary to achieve the broadly agreed upon goals of a society.
Yes, that’s why Somalia’s warlord bands provide better government than Norway. :rolleyes:
If anything, thousands of years of human history show that Scandinavia has provided the best quality of life ever achieved. Show me where this minimum government of yours is from, and what their quality of life is?
Note I said the minimum necessary to achieve the goals of society. What Somalia has is just warlords.
And if quality of life is the most important thing, then I guess that’s fine. That’s not our goal here. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nothing more, nothing less.
Scandinavia has that stuff too.
When did they get their first legal private TV station? What was it, the 1990s? Hard to argue that you’re free when the government so tightly controls the means of communication. Things are a lot better now, of course. Although Sweden taxes the living hell out of the middle class in ways we would never tolerate here, seeing as how we kinda like pursuing happiness:
In another thread, someone pondered if we’d ever see a 40-state landslide again. If a Democrat ever ran proposing this level of taxation on middle class voters(51% at $62,000 taxable income + a 25% VAT), the GOP would win 50.
Thats a strange take away from thousands of years of human history. Judging a brief moment in time is no way to extole the primary benefits of Scandinavian political economy. You can come back after a century or so of ever increasing Scandinavian government and make that case. Until then all you have is a decade or three of good quality of life in Scandinavia. Judging the entire human history of political economy by comparing it to 30 years of Scandinavian modernity is not to be encouraged. At least until its a proven long term success. Or, until the Scandinavian model has successfully dealt with immigrants by the millions, an aging population, and a centralised government based 1500 miles away.
1960’s Detroit was a success too, I hear.
Arguably, the Scandinavian countries have dealt with that: by moving steadily to the right on economic issues.
I know a few Scandinavian countries(noticeably Sweden) did move to the right a few decades ago. Try explaining that to people who dont wish to hear it though. It’s fingers in the ear time for many people when you try explaining the relative move to the Right in Sweden.
So what’s the point of giving examples of taxpayer funded benefits in a discussion about insurance? Do you get liberal posting points or something?
We’re discussing mandated insurance.
I welcome actual examples of Adaher’s thousands of years of history showing us how awesome minimal government is. Somewhere above Somalia, I guess. That’s good to know.
I agree.
The sentence on the face of it is fine. It’s that it’s being used as an defense of the GOP’s anti-government fetishism.
And I use it to defend expansion of regulation and taxation of industry. We only disagree on where to draw the line.