 Quote:
Originally Posted by samclem
I think if you'd said this you would have captured my feelings: "perhaps it's the official, mandatory taking of the things you worked for (e.g. the product of your time, which can never be replaced) that turns you off."
But, as I said earlier, a little socialism and unfair confiscation is the price we pay to live in the world's most prosperous nation. Made prosperous by the efforts of individuals, each pursuing their individual goals for the betterment of us all. "Invisible hand" and all that rot.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." Adam Smith
Taxes and regulation introduce friction and inefficiencies into this system. Some of that is unavoidable and even beneficial overall (just as brakes and clutches introduce friction into the workings of a car, which is a good thing). Taking resources from productive people and giving them to less productive people cannot be expected to produce an overall increase in productivity. Such redistribution may have other benefits (on the karmic balance sheet), but we should all realize that it makes us poorer as a society. I think the karmic balance sheet is boosted more by voluntary giving.
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I guess I don't understand how it makes us poorer! There is simply a clash between any distributive scheme of resources by the Government and notion of unrestrained individual liberty. Robert Nozick's Wilt Chamberlain example demonstrated that. But in countless ways we restrain individual liberty and we don't really have major philosophical angst with that.
Topic aside, what annoys me about these threads is that since I've been on this forum -- we've have these debates a lot, typically initiated by the original poster in a thread which bores little resemblance to a philosophical debate of justice and libertarianism. I don't learn any new issues, I don't get any additional insight, and quite frankly they appear to me to just be a "rant" about how someone's individual liberty is being taken away and how it's unfair to have a forced distribution of resources. I guess the soap box is a good place for the rant, but I'm tired of it and I'm exercising my liberty by putting on the ignore button for the original poster.
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