On Monday 24 October 2005 08:19 am, Roedy Green wrote: > On Mon, 24 Oct 2005 12:35:13 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote, > quoted or indirectly quoted someone who said : > > >I see that you cannot make a reasoned argument against the fact that > >property in the form of houses is taxed in America. > > And what has his inability to do that to your satisfaction got to do > with the price of eggs?
Funny you should ask that. Taxation, mostly in the form of income tax supports a system of farm subsidies in the United States, that pays farmers for surplus product, thus artificially elevating the price of several farm products, including milk, cheese, and (you guessed it) eggs. The purpose of this (ostensibly anyway) is to keep family farmers in business, because that is viewed as a social benefit in itself (I happen to agree with this statement, even if it does mean I pay more for eggs -- though the price is still one of the lowest globally, because the US has such a large natural surplus of agricultural products owing to arable land and mostly good weather). Of course it does produce one of the most notorious examples of wastage -- much of that surplus is allowed to rot (or at least this *was* true at one time, I haven't fact-checked that in over a decade). It has been proposed that most of that food should instead go to foreign aid, or to programs within the US for eliminating poverty. Certainly some of it does, I have no idea what the current balance is, though. The ability to do this, moreover represents the philosophical point that the government "owns" the economy, in that it has the right, representing the interests of the people, to pursue public good by manipulating the economy. In other words, we do not believe in the formal concept of a laissez faire economy, nor in the idea of "anarchic libertarianism". People who do support the latter kind of idea frequently say that a company should be "allowed to do anything to pursue profit, as long as it isn't illegal". But of course, they usually turn around and say that "there is no natural law". The combination of the two philosophies is nonsensical -- if law consists only of artificial constraints, then there is no natural basis for arguing what the law "should" allow. Hence, only the will of the people matters, which means any form of monopoly restriction is entirely within the powers of a democratic government to pursue. Since this includes ANY economic system from "laissez faire capitalism" to "pure communism", it has no persuasive power whatsoever, and should be dropped. If on the other hand, you believe (as I do), that State law is an embodiment, backed up by State power, to implement the best approximation we can manage of "natural law" (i.e. law as evident to at least a consensus of human minds, albeit through transcendental rather than empirical derivation), then there IS a basis for arguing what laws "should" be. But you can't make arguments about what law "should" be if you don't acknowledge that law is measured against some external standard. This is of course, another result of the Human tendency to confuse "NULL" with "ZERO". The absence of an external system of evaluating law, does not mean that all laws must be negated. It equates to having no basis for prefering them to exist or not, and thus abdicating all right to change them. People who believe this really need, therefore, to shut up. ;-D -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list