I wrote:
> Today, just about all of the dollar value of the things you see around you > are owned by the government or corporations. One hospital, for example, cost > as much as several hundred houses . . . The point being, that hospital is largely paid for by taxes -- Medicare -- even if it is private. Craig Haynie is paying for it, whether he wants to or not. I think we all agree this is unfair in many ways. But I cannot imagine how you could run a high-tech civilization such as ours on any other basis. Imagine you were to go around asking people: "do you feel it is part of your value system to install X or Y" where X or Y represent fiber optic cables, the latest hospital gadget, the GPS system, the metal detector under the street that triggers the turn signal, or some other piece of the modern infrastructure. Most people would probably have no idea what what you are talking about. They would say "I guess so . . . what is it for?" Our technology is so complicated and so inter-connected, no one really has a complete grasp of how big it is or who pays for it, and it is not possible for you to completely "opt out" of the parts you do not like, or need. It is physically inter-dependent and interconnected in ways that cannot be untangled, literally, figuratively, financially and every other way. If you do not have cable TV, you may think that you contribute nothing to the cable infrastructure outside your house. Ah, but the wires are run on the same polls used for electric power lines. The power company comes by periodically to trim the trees. That benefits the cable company too. If you pay for electricity, you are helping to pay for your neighbor's cable TV. I do not have cable TV; I have satellite TV. I pay the bills for it, but so do you, because NASA and others developed the technology to put the satellite up there. So do the Japanese taxpayers, since I watch the NHK national news broadcast from Japan. Modern capitalism is far removed from the days when Henry Ford built self-sufficient, stand-alone factory complexes that processed all the raw materials and output cars. As I mentioned, the total value of buildings, roads, bridges, hospitals and whatnot outside your house far exceeds the value of your house, and this is not the way things were decades ago, or centuries ago. Most people are not aware of this, because the change happened gradually. We have much more public property and corporate property than our ancestors did. A pipeline is mainly paid for by people who buy gas, but a substantial portion of it ends up being for from taxes. For example, someone has to inspect and regulate the pipelines, refineries and drilling platforms, and when there is an accident such as the drilling disaster this summer, it costs everyone. That makes it hard for someone to withdraw from society, and I think it makes it impossible for taxes to go back to what they were before the 1930s and the growth of the modern infrastructure. We may fancy ourselves self-sufficient rugged individualists in the old-fashioned American sense, but we are nothing like that anymore. We would not survive one month in that world. I used to know farmers in the U.S. and Japan who were self-sufficient, with a lifestyle and hand-tool technology essentially stuck in the 19th century. They were admirable people. I can report that practically no one alive today would know how to live like that. There is no going back to a simple life. There is no way Craig Haynie can decide which part of our complex society he wishes to pay for, and which parts he does not want to pay for because they are contrary to his values. I wish that were not so. Many things such as highways and the war in Iraq are contrary to my values, but I cannot opt out of paying for them. - Jed
