Craig <[email protected]> wrote: Yes, I'm referring to the law. The law is backed by violence and threats > of violence. Library fines are agreed upon when a person signs up for > the library; but it's not valid to take a large geographic area and > claim the authority to control the actions of all the people within it. >
You never agreed not to jay-walk or spit on the sidewalk, but you must follow those laws as well. To bad for you. Theoretically, you could be forcibly arrested for jay-walking. I get what you are saying, but you should recognize that I disagree, and nearly everyone else disagrees. We say that "taxes are the price we pay for civilization" (Holmes). The fact that taxes and all other laws are backed by the implicit use of force does not bother us, because the alternative is much worse. By striving for an ideal, you would make the perfect the enemy of the good. > How many billions is Bill Gates giving away? Warren Buffet? There are a > lot of wealthy philanthropists. > No, there are not. Gates and Buffet are newsworthy because they are so rare. If most wealthy people did this, no one would point to Gates and Buffet. You need to watch that video and get a grip on reality. Watch the whole thing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0ehzfQ4hAQ > But the wealthy don't become wealthy by stealing money. They acquire > wealth through voluntarily providing goods and services to others. Many of them inherit wealth these days, or they are rentiers. Many have gained enormous amounts by gaming the system, and by reducing the taxes they pay down to ~12% (Romney's tax level). We may have to disagree on the facts here, but if a person 'wants' to > live in a first-world country, and it is a 'fact' that the only way to > do it is to give money to a central authority so that the central > authority can spend it, instead of allowing the individual to spend it > himself; then once these facts are presented to people, they would sign > up for such an arrangement voluntarily. We cannot change our technological and economic systems overnight even if we want to. Even if most people agreed with you and we decided to get rid of the highway systems or our electric power distribution system, we cannot do that. We depend on these things for our survival. We would starve to death without them. We are, to some extent, slaves to our technology. Everyone throughout history has been. We have more choices and a lighter burden than people did in the past, when nearly everyone had to work on a farm. Perhaps cold fusion will give us an alternative to the centralized high tech world we live in. Perhaps we will no longer need big electric power companies, and big government to regulate the power companies, and to build highways. Cold fusion may even do away with the need for sewers, as I said. If these alternative technologies becomes available, then society can hold a debate and we decide to let people opt out of using electricity and flush toilets. Technology always comes at a cost. You can never have exactly what you want. Our infrastructure requires that we have big government and big industry. These things, in turn, require that we have some level of compulsion so that most people are forced to contribute what is necessary to keep the machinery going. That may not be ideal but it is better than the chaos, decay, filth and starvation you find in Mexico, India or Somalia. > This is my point about the > Woodlands. People like order. They like beauty. They like roads, courts, > police, parks, and all things they take for granted, and it's not > difficult to get them to agree to it once they see how these benefits > will be provided for the money they spend. > You are highly unrealistic. I suggest you take a trip to India or China. You will see what happens when you make taxes and social obligations an option for wealthy and middle-class people. They do not like beauty. They do not like roads, courts, parks or police. Not as much as they love money. They build walls around their houses, and they let poor people live in filth and starve to death at the gates of their houses. You can walk down urban streets in these countries and see that for yourself. In the morning you will see emaciated corpses of dead people lying in the gutters and in filth-choked streams. I mean it. This is not a fantasy or an exaggeration. This is life in the third world, and this is how life was like in New York City in 1900. There is plenty of wealth in India and China. These problems could easily be fixed. Everyone could have a decent life. The poverty is caused by wealthy people who take for themselves everything not nailed down. Look at that video and you see that wealthy people in the U.S. would do the same thing, if they could get away with it. This is human nature. - Jed
