[Preechr]

Isn't that odd?

Kahl, it's not that. I was trying to respond in order last night, but I was also trying to do some other stuff and I got a bit distracted. I didn't post as much as I wanted.

To answer your point, though, in a general sense I still think you're looking at it wrong. Yes, politicians get paid to do their jobs, and yes, most of what the government does day to day is shuffling money around. You have to ask yourself though: Why do they do what they do? What is their motivation. The answer is clearly not involving the accumulation of wealth.

If your goal was the accumulation of wealth, would you set out to reach it by spending trillions of dollars on social programs? Would you waste cash on the level that governments do? Power is a decidedly different thing from money. If you have 10 million dollars and I have but ten cents, you have no inherent power over me until you decide to buy some power with your money... Just as you have no cattle until you BUY some with your money.

Money may offer you advantages over those that have less of it, but not if it's just sitting in the bank doing nothing. What you see as a cash engine is a motor that runs on money but produces power. When the government levies a tax on you, yes, it reduces your bottom line, but the net effect is that you lose the potential advantage of having that money in your pocket. The money was potential energy, where those advantages you might have gained from spending it however you might have had it not been taken from you would have been an active, kinetic force to be used to your benefit, given you hadn't planned on pissing it away on tina and lottery tickets. That kinetic force was your potential power.

The government taxes you in order to remove your power in certain ways. One obvious example is to support the poor. I work with handicapped kids, and thus within the confines of what Medicaid will pay for. Confront any parent of a handicapped child with libertarian theories on social programs, and prepare yourself for a heated argument. Many people, especially those living every day in direct need of financial help at the risk of their child's health or even survival, believe that were it not for government taking on the responsibility of forcing their neighbors to contribute to their aid they would be left to shrivel and die.

To a point, they are kinda right. The situation is much more complex than one for which I could reasonably offer you a quick fix. I believe very much in people. I also believe our society, at least the American part of it with which I am most familiar, is sick. When I am told that were government social programs to disappear, many good people that depend on that assistance would suffer and die because people will only care for them when forced, I ask why that is. I would propose an answer: Because we have grown accustomed to government handling these sorts of responsibilities for us. We have learned that it is Ok to ignore other people's problems... that government will take care of them for us.

You wake up each day with the power to make a very real difference in the lives of those you might meet. You have the potential power to change the world around you for the better. What we have done by delegating these responsibilities to the State is that we have transferred what is possibly our most important powers over to government. We gave "at the office."

I tend toward being a Romantic. I can easily be accused of living in a fantasy world by what I post on message boards. IRL, I let my ideologies govern my decisions, but I live very much in the real world we all share. What I am asking of you, kahl, is to walk with me into my ideology and help me iron out the details while figuring out for me how the transition from our world to this might best be made. You tend to argue blindly, preferring to pick on the details of whomever you've decided to engage, ignoring the big picture. Argument is a process of agreement, not dissent.

You can be pretty frustrating to talk to, and I have ignored you in the past because you over-focus sometimes on points I don't think can be made... and sometimes you're just too high to make any sense... but in this discussion I will try my best to address any point you bring up. I work a lot though, so you might have to be patient with me between posts. Before jumping to attack, try attempting to fit each question you have into a larger picture of a world you might actually enjoy living within.

I'm gonna go back and work on the posts I've missed now...