Craig:
The U.S. Government does not have the right to take your life or property at
will. You argument is ridiculous.
If you are a citizen of this country, you maintain that status by agreeing
to live by the law, which is established by the will of its citizens under
the constitution. You certainly don't have to maintain that status, no one
is forcing you to maintain the status. You do not have the right to that
status and at the same time refuse to obey the law of this country.
This system of government is not perfect and someday a better system maybe
established but it is the best designed up to this point. If you don't like
how your taxes are used, you can voice that opinion and see if you can
effect a change. That is it. Otherwise either live with it or leave, there
are plenty of people in this world who be happy to take your place.
Ransom
----- Original Message -----
From: "Craig Haynie" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2012 4:10 PM
Subject: Re: [Vo]:re the alternative history of LENR
On 05/31/2012 04:19 PM, Jed Rothwell wrote:
Craig Haynie <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
If the technology is cost efficient, then the market will bring
it. Even if delayed by 20 to 50 years, this is a small price to
pay for a moral society run without threats of violence.
You want to talk about violence?
If France and the UK had delayed developing aviation before WWI they
would have lost the war. They had a slight edge thanks to aircraft such
as the Sopwith Camel (the best fighter of the war, based on enemy
aircraft losses). Slight, but crucial.
So is it your argument that national defense is so important that
therefore, we have to use a little aggression here and there to protect
ourselves from a larger aggression from invading armies? If so, then I
suggest that you live in the best of all possible worlds because this
'little aggression' is used for justification for every program, policy,
law, regulation, and statute, that governments create. There is no such
thing as minor aggression which can be used for a larger good. If we want
to protect our lives and property, does it make sense to give one large
institution the one great exception, which allows it to take our lives and
property at will?
Or if the British had delayed the Hurricane, the Spitfire and radar in
the 1930s, Hitler would have won in 1940.
If the U.S. had not invested in the bomb, I am sure there would have been
a million more Japanese killed or died of starvation, hundreds of
thousands more Americans killed, and Japan would have been divided
between the North and South, like Korea, because the Russians were
preparing to invade from the North. U.S. invasion forces in Japan
included 800,000 men, compared to just over 100,000 in the Normandy
invasion.
If enough people are worried about staying ahead of the enemy, and if the
government has to budget its limited resources to protect the country,
then nothing is stopping them from trying to raise the money to do so. I
am just saying that we have to get rid of this moral exception. Do we know
that the government could not raise enough money to maintain its nuclear
arsenal, to deter foreign aggression? No one is even thinking about it. No
one is trying to find alternate solutions which don't involve aggression.
It would be a different world, and one which probably would not come about
without a large number of people who believe in it; and if a large number
of people from all over the world started believing in non-aggression,
then it's likely no new Hitlers will show up, and if they did, they would
still have to face a voluntarily funded nuclear arsenal.
In every case, the overall investments made by governments has
paid back many times over. Individual ventures failed but
overall the projects succeeded.
Not true. There was no return for the people whose money was
taken. There was no poll of those people, before their money was
taken, asking if they'd be willing to invest.
Yes, there was. It is called an election. The Erie canal was a major
political issue and policy. Road building has always been a make or break
local issue, as it is in Atlanta this year.
The election did not poll the individual people whose money was taken, and
did not give them the choice to invest or not. The election takes a
majority of those who show up at the polls and gives them, and their
party, the authority to use force against others, so that they can pursue
their own pet projects.
[...]
This is another way of saying that the other investments during
this period were both profitable and of lower risk. Who knows what
would have come out of these investments if these people had had
more money to invest in the ventures they were interested in,
instead of having their money taken from them.
Wonderful in theory. In practice it has never worked that way, and it
never will. Here in the real world Uncle Sam has always been the main
source of technological progress. You are living in an Ivory Tower.
There's a saying by some that the Means justifies the Ends. I think we
should start looking toward the Means AS the End.
Craig
