But who really believes that? Everyone, RR included, sees legitimate roles for the government and presumably wants the government to succeed in those roles. Are you suggesting that anyone who doesn’t agree with what you see as the role of government ought to be excluded from the debate? You’re begging the question, ISTM. It is a legitimate question to ask “should the government be doing X?” And in a given scenario, this one included, reasonable people can disagree.
The old saying about “give a man a fish and he eats today; teach him to fish and he eats every day” seems quite appropriate here. The libs seem to think that taking the second step is somehow distasteful and that conservatives are arrogant for wanting to do so.
Yes, I think. Let me state it in my own words and you tell me.
Using force against other people is a bad thing in general, and should only be done when justified. The government obtains money by the threat of force. The government’s use of force to collect money from everyone is justified only where the government will spend the money on something with more-or-less equal benefits for everyone (e.g., national defense, police and such, and roads and such).
Can you demonstrate why the idea of “maybe something isn’t really a problem if not that many people want to give money to charity to fix it” is an example of the Just World Fallacy? Thanks.
Cite, please?
I agree with Rand Rover on this one.
I favor limited government. That means I’d like less deficit spending and less taxes…and less government in general. I’d like to pose a serious question here. Does this mean I’m NOT a fiscal conservative? Is there a better label for me? I’m open.
There was a time, not too long ago when the wealthiest nations had kings and they would do all sort of nasty things to their subjects and to people from other countries. Are you saying that this was the right thing to do at the time?
Are you serious about this? You honestly don’t think this is complex? Just for the heck of it let’s consider hip replacement surgery. How much does each one cost? How many are performed in each country? What is the effect on quality of life? Which is better, a country which denies this procedure past the age of 70 or a country that allows it for everyone? Where would you like to live?
To me these are very complex issues with no easy answers.
Maybe right-wingers hate the poor.
…On the other hand, left-wingers, with their bleeding hearts, love the poor. They love them so much that their policies perpetuate them 
This is not the same thing as what I am saying. The kinds of benefits I am talking about are the benefits that once provided, everyone else gets benefits from whether they pay or not. In other words, you can’t restrict people’s access to them. National defense is national defense: we do not exclude the land and property of those who don’t pay. So these standards don’t quite line up.
Your standard, equal provision of goods, seems kind of problematic. Even before splitting hairs, it’s easy to see how people do not actually benefit equally from this stuff. People on the borders benefit more from national defense, people with property to protect benefit more from law enforcement and policing, and people with cars or who drive long distances certainly benefit more from roads. Our most basic public goods are may be more or less equal in access but are very unequal in provision. For the most part, people also really can’t provide any of these goods themselves if they don’t feel they are getting enough from the state.
It’s not hard to imagine a public healthcare scheme that would not only not exclude people but would also provide more or less equal quantities of public goods to everyone. The benefits would be easily quantifiable, so it’s much easier to see how this might be more equal than the benefits from, say, police.
No, it’s just trite. Words I live by might be more like, “Give a man a splenectomy and he lives to eat and carry on being a productive member of society, except when his weakened immune system is taken down by a nasty cold or the flu in which case he may need a few days off.”
Your views regarding the liberal stance on education are probably wrong.
I don’t think so. Going by this, poverty has gone down during less conservative administrations and up during more conservative administrations. I’m not one to claim that a country’s government is entirely responsible for its economic upturns and downturns, but whatever Bush I and Bush II did to alleviate the problem didn’t seem to help, whereas whatever Clinton was doing, did. Or his policies didn’t stand in the way of people not being poor at any rate.
Graphs like that are why I disregard the claims that poor people are lazy or stupid or whatever. I’m to believe that people decide to be lazy and poor for a while, then after a few years decide not to be poor, can’t handle the opulent lifestyle $25 000 or so can buy, then go back to being poor again, am I?
It has been my experience that people who bitch about how easy it is for the poor will do just about anything to avoid being one of them.
Reagan-deficits don’t matter
Cheney -deficits don’t matter
Bush 1 and 2 -Deficits don’t matter
Clinton we have to balance the budget and control spending. Obama ,we will fix fix the deficit after we repair the economy.
The Repub stance is not repub actions. they say one thing and do another. They are the cut taxes and spend party. How has that worked out / Their Libertarian ideas pushed by Greenspan and Paulson has worked well too, hasn’t it.
The repubs misrepresent their intentions and somehow they have people dumb enough to swallow it.
Sounds like you’re saying the Republicans weren’t true fiscal conservatives…I agree, they haven’t been for the most part, too bad.
But then you blame Libertarians?
Very frustrating that so many people don’t understand the difference between a Republican and a fiscal conservative.
Seems like a lot of people believe that:
59% Still Believe Government Is the Problem
There’s no point talking about govt. implemented solutions to problems with people who are ideologically inclined to believe such things do not exist. IME, there are a lot of such people out there.
I went looking for xtisme’s libertarians:
a decade and more ago; never found a single example. I did find a lot of self-rightous bastards who hated the Feds because they interfered with their schemes for self-enrichment.
These people will never actually go away and let us live in a democratic utopia, so it’d be foolish not to acknowledge their existence and work to minimize the effectiveness of their machinations.
Naturally Stratocaster, as a conservative, your mileage on these people varies from mine; but please don’t try to pretend such folk don’t exist. It lowers your credibility.
This doesn’t occur often, but I happen to agree with gonzo here. I’ve often said, at least the Dems (on matters of spending) do what they say they’re going to. Bush spent money like a drunken sailor, but never abandoned the banner of “we’re the party of small government and reduced spending.” Yeah, right.
I want a fiscally conservative president, and I could not care less what party he belongs to.
I disagree with your assessment of them, not their existence. I also disagree that these people don’t see a legitimate role for government, if that’s an assertion. I do concur that they don’t agree with the scope of duties you assign to the government, and I understand why as a practical matter you’d like them excluded from the debate, their influence eliminated. But I do not agree that they don’t have a legitimate voice, and I think your position, if I understand it correctly, is decidedly undemocratic. We don’t include only those people we agree with in political discourse.
Then you should have said that, rather than:
If everyone believes something, then there’s no one in the set of “those who do not believe.” Yet here you are simultaneously claiming “everyone believes”, and the existence of “those who do not believe.”
Nope, they can talk all they want. We’re just under no compulsion to listen to them. Nothing undemocratic about that; in fact, suggesting we should have to listen to claptrap strikes me as a rather undemocratic attitude.
If their ideas have merit, let them convince a majority and vote the implementors into office. If all they have is a noisy minority, they need to be continually reminded that that’s all they have. Trying to implement policy by working with those who feel that any policy whatsoever is wrong is the height of insanity, rather than a pinnacle of democracy.
A problem as a situation where something should be done to fix it. Note that this definition does not commit to any particular form of an actor who should be doing the fixing.
So we have a problem–but you say that unless well-funded charities spring up to fix it, it’s not actually a problem. If charities aren’t springing up, that’s ipso facto indicative of something not being a problem. So the world as it exists is a just world, because although there are four possible classifications of situations–UN (unproblematic situations not getting charity), UC, PC, and PN–you’re claiming that the members of UC and PN make up a null set, and since PN is by definition the only morally unacceptable situation (since it’s a situation where something should be done about it but nothing’s getting done), there are no morally negative situations that actually exist.
Indeed, your principle cuts further than this. Not only does the presence of charities indicate that something’s a problem, but the level of funding they get also shows how big a problem something is. Giving money actually makes no sense, because to the extent that there’s a problem, it’s already getting the appropriate amount of money.
Which gets at the central issue in your logic. You’re treating giving to charity as something demanded by charity recipients/the charities themselves and supplied by donors. But that’s mixing things up! The opportunity to give to charity is something demanded by donors and supplied by charities. People with money give to charity because they want to because it satisfies their sense of morality, which makes them feel good.
Luckily enough, people’s sense of morality isn’t totally random–there is usually some correlation between what actually is a problem and what moral codes classify as a problem. But it’s far from a perfect one, and other factors–racial antagonism, not wanting to think about sad things like cancer, moral opprobrium toward things like drug use–can counteract it.
So you can have social problems where charities aren’t able to get enough funding to do enough. Many liberals see solving these problems as a public good and believe that it’s economically better to use government to subsidize public goods than not. Hence, public policy.
No, he isn’t. You’re looking at a claim about the specific government in power right now, and claiming it applies to all hypothetical governments that could exist. “Government A is bad” and “Government B would be good” are not contradictory statements.
Then I misunderstood you, and we are still in disagreement. I do not concede that (outside the lunatic fringe) there are people who believe there is no legitimate role for the government, none whatsoever. Not RR, not anyone in my experience. People who disagree with your idea of government’s role are not, by definition, believers that government has no role.
Neither side is compelled to work with the other, and I don’t see any virtue in insisting they do so on matters where they are diametrically opposed.