Danger said:
sstype,
You are making the false assertation that the seized wealth has made the US prosperous. A very false premise.
How is this a false premise?
Government intervention has been a venerable American tradition since its founding.
-By using "seized wealth" in the form of taxation, in the 1800s government funded the construction of thousands of miles of canals, providing some 70 percent of all investment.
-In the last half of the nineteenth century, the federal government provided millions of acres in land grants to railroads, along with various other subsidies.
-In the early twentieth century, it subsidized electrification and the extension of telephone service into rural areas.
-In 1956, Congress passed legislation to build 41,000 miles of interstate highways in what President Dwight Eisenhower (Republican) lauded as “the greatest public works program in the history of the world.”
-In the late twentieth century, government funded the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which gave birth to the inventions underlying the Internet as well as nanotechnolgy.
I'm not saying that the government intervention was the sole reason for our nation's prosperity, but how exactly has any of it hurt our ability to become the world's superpower?
Remember that those "green tickets" are a representation of that man's labor.
Read my last post.....would you rather work for 1 million in war-torn Somalia or pay half in taxes but live in the U.S? You're not ok with any of the fruits of your labor being "seized" to ensure a stable and safe living environment?
I do not value a person by how much money he has, so I am not sure where you are getting that. Altho money generated by a person can be a good indication of how much wealth they are giving to certain members of society.
It can be a good indication, except when its not. There are plenty of socially useless, non-productive, inefficient free-market activities which create more problems than they solve.
Are you telling me that a tobacco or fast-food company executive should be more respected/admired than a NASA Physicist? After all, one works in the private sector, creator and giver of all wealth....the other is a lazy government bureaucrat who is seizing that poor executive's wealth researching new technologies which could potentially provide free-market entrepreneurs an opportunity to develop an offshoot product/service to sell to the public. If only Mr. Marlboro could keep more of his hard earned wealth so he can have more incentive to sell more cigarettes.
I know you don't think that but its this sort of ideological rigidity which prevents an understanding that government is not the root of all of society's ills and that the free-markets cannot and will not be able to solve all of society's problems. If that were the case, Somalia and Mexico (little taxes, no safety net) would be a booming paradises and the developed world (all which have graduated income taxes and social programs for the poor) would be totalitarian third-world hellholes.
Money cannot be the sole criteria by which to judge either self-esteem or personal well-being.
Your statements do not change the fact that seizing money from someone just because they have it still amounts to theft. Giving stolen money away to people who "need" it does not make it any less of a theft. They are just rationalizations for that action. Much like claiming that we see "poor" people as subhuman.
Every one of these statements is either guilt, shaming, rationalization or a way to tell the world that you are "better people" than those of us who are so evil that we wish to keep the fruits of our labor and force others to be accountable for their own position in life.
Look man, if it bothers you so much that others are stealing your wealth why don't you just go live in Mexico? Mexico is a libertarian paradise and that portions of the country are government-free, ruled by those who have bullets and money. There are very low taxes, few regulations, and environmentalists, socialists and liberals are few and far between. There is no Obamacare, and Mexico is the home of Carlos Slim, the world's richest man, a tribute to Mexican crony capitalism. No one will ask you to spend your taxes on lazy unemployed folks or any other "socialism". It's a Darwinian wet-dream where money rules above all and the government governs solely for the rich. Every man for themselves....right?
When companies and businesses are unrestricted, the first thing any successful large company will do to ensure its survival is to influence the governing body that makes the laws which restrict business.
Then, they push through laws which prohibit competing industries from accessing valuable resources in order to keep it all for themselves. They then subsidized their products so as to make it omnipresent to the American consumer. And, from there, the interests of those industries are presented as synonymous with the well-being of the entire nation. And, that my friends, is how libertarianism had allowed for the oil industry to become so entrenched in American politics.
As nice as the system sounds, it's about as realistic in practice as nationwide Communism.
Both systems are ideals which are never, ever going to function in the real world.
