Video games.
Does anyone here actually believe what Mitt Romey says?
@A_Talking_Donkey said:
@imsh_pl said:
How does the government not help the poor? As someone who has had to use food stamps while in college and also has been homeless for a brief time I have to wonder if you drooled on yourself while typing this. Also, what if the people want to act through the government? I haven't seen many people voting to get rid of the government which seems to suggest Americans want government to act on their behalf.
Ok first of all, I know government helps the poor in some ways, it just doesn't do it as efficiently as the free market.
And 'people acting through the government' means that people are simply using threats of violence to get what the they want (disobey the law=>go to jail, try to escape =>die)
People are not voting to get rid of government because there is no such option. Besides, people should not be forced to use the govt system of democratic voting if they haven't agreed to it in the first place.
I've never agreed to be governed so I don't have any responsibility to obide by the governmental system.
This is why I carefully chose the wording "inherently good-natured". I think people are capable of being good, I just don't think people are good by default. Humans aren't some hive-minded creature working in complete unity. Choosing political leaders isn't easy, it's hard. Finding the stand out people who are well qualified to lead is probably both the most difficult thing to do and the most important thing we have to decide on in our lives. I also didn't say "people" need to be governed, I said societies do. Governing isn't about micro-managing persons, its about macro-managing economic flow.
I know that people are not good by default; in fact I later said that the scientific evidence shows that people are nothing by 'default'.
You said 'societies need to be governed', which is just an assertion. You didn't even define society or government.
This is comparable apples to oranges. Charities may seem more efficient because they have less bloated surface costs which means that in some major ways they are more efficient. However that misses the key difference between a charity and the government which is one is mandatory. While I can't give you statistics for this year, according to the AAFC America gave 298 billion dollars to charity last year. "Welfare" isn't a thing the government spends on and is a rather hard thing to pinpoint exact numbers but about 77 billion was spent on SNAP last year, 5 billion on LIHEAP, 17 billion on TANF, and 43 billion on HUD so we spent 142 billion dollars on helping poor people (specifically) last year. Of that 298 billion dollars of charity 12% or 35.76 billion was spent on social service charities with only some fraction of that going to help the poor directly. The government does almost 4 times as much for poor people as charity does, efficiency be damned.
Every single dollar you mentioned was taken from the taxpayers by the threat of physical violence. The ends do not justify the means.
And if they do, they do for all the people, not just the ones in the government.
So if you say that people can be forced to pay taxes there is no logical reason why only the ones in the government should tax. If taxing others is good, it's good for everyone. A moral nature of a human being doesn't change because he becomes part of a group called 'government'.
Be consistent.
I sorta already answered this but to sum up that point again some people do things which are detrimental to society, some people are good. People naturally create governing forces (call it government or not, whatever) so inevitably we need to choose good leaders.
Again, the claim that people have always been creating government is no justification for its existence, or a proof that they'll continue doing it.
Before slavery was abolished, it had been practiced in every society, does that mean that slavery is part of man's natural way of living?
This question is a bit hard to answer without first asking you a question (which is really poor debate form btw). Are you assuming humans are free actors and laws only take away freedom or are you assuming humans are agents acting upon laws that specifically tell them what actions they can or can't make?
Every human beings owns their body, the effects of their body, and the fruits of their labour. This is an axiom called self-ownership.
Therefore we can conclude that every form of violating someone else's body or property is inherently immoral (and therefore can be stopped with violence). This is called the non-aggression principle (NAP): thou shalt not initiate force against thy fellow human being.
Make of that what you will.
This depends on how you're defining government. If you take government to mean body of people who govern part of or all of a society than technically there has never been human civilization without government since in a naturalistic primitive communism (in other words hunter-gatherer society) the people had to distribute agriculture since there was no concept of capital and they also had to enforce some form of social code. There are also cultures of subsistence agriculturalists but really, they too have the head of families as governing bodies so in the loosest definition of government they've always had one too.
The definition of government is quite simple if you think about it.
First of all, it's a group of people. It's not an ideal, not a building, not land or a set of rules.
Second of all, it has a jurisdiction over a given geographical area.
Thirdly, the difference between a government and any other organization is that it can morally use force against those who do not wish to obey its rules or fund its endeavours, regardless of their prior consent.
They can tax you, you can't tax each other, you sure as hell can't tax them back. They can punish you with violence if you disobey one of its laws, even if by doing so you're not harming anyone else (for example they can punish you if you carry the wrong kind of vegetation in your pocket) - can't do the same to anyone else.
A government is, therefore, a group of individuals in a given geographical area that has the legal and moral right to initiate the use of force.
The initiation of force is a direct contradiction of self-owneship and the NAP.
@Vashyron: Have read anything I said, I don't support the Democrats either, that's my point.
@pyrodactyl said:
@imsh_pl You start from the premise that our only motivation as human being is getting more money. When it comes time to cast my vote, getting more money is really not my top concerne. When we elect a representative, his goal is certainly not to get richer.
I never said that our only motivation is to get money.
My argument was a response to people who say that 'in a stateless society money would be power and it would be unjust' etc.
I think that was even your argument, in a way.
And I respectfully disagree that the main interest of a representative is not his own profit (be it money or power or even the fulfillment taken from helping the people, which I find to rarely be the case).
What has fema done for NJ?
the red cross has raised probably half a billion dollars already. If there was anything you could buy to give to those people in need the cash is there. The real problem is getting the actual supplies there. The next issue will be manpower, once they start rebuilding homes they will only be able to work as fast as available manpower will allow, money wont be an issue (most of the time).
There's no reason to.
Just a little bit of fact checking shatters almost anything that comes out of the man's mouth.
His entire campaign is a shallow lie, based on false statistics and misinformation.
@dudeglove said:
Quick, everyone bust out their introduction to political philosophy from first year (that they only ever read the first chapter of)!
I'd bet that college students taking political philosophy classes are among the more informed people out there... You've pretty much described a lot of us (including me), and I'm definitely no expert, but I know more about the issues than my parents or grandparents.
@chrissedoff said:
Boy, it really chafes me that libertarians are uniformly too dumb or myopic to realize that government helps the rich more than it helps the poor.
...but the fact that the government by nature favours the rich over the poor is EXACTLY the reason why libertarians want to shrink the government as much as possible.
I DON'T want the government to help me at the expense of others. All I ask in return is stop taking my money and let me live my life as I want to without harming anybody. I know better what's good for me, and I will never force anyone to provide things I need.
You know all that wealth that rich people worked so doggone hard to accumulate?It all kind of disappears without a government to guarantee their property rights.
The government can violate property rights at will. In my country it takes about 50% of your income even if you don't want it to. You call that property rights protection?
The more you have, the more invested you are a society with a functioning, stable government. Therefore, you pay more taxes. Too bad. The people who have thrived in such a society and then try to pull the ladder up so that nobody else gets the same opportunity are the real thieves. Pay the damn piper.
My tax money was taken from me LITERALLY by gunpoint; if I hadn't paid it I would've gone to jail. And yet you blame me if I use services which the government provides using the money that was previously mine?
All I'm asking is for you to stop caring about how I use my money. You take nothing from me, I will take nothing from you. You don't force me to pay taxes, I seek alternatives to the police and courts in the free market. Deal?
Also, it really chafes me that libertarians love to project this image of being sober intellectuals by name-checking Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek constantly, yet they are so ignorant about the subject of economics that they apparently are unaware of the free rider problem.
There are perfectly viable free market solution to the free rider problem, economic ostricizm being one of the most powerful ones. Give me a specific example of a free rider problem which I'll attempt to solve.
Don't just generalize and assume that I haven't thought these problems through, it doesn't speak too much highly of you.
@Milkman said:
@JustinNotJason: I'd love to hear your reasoning behind Rachel Maddow being a "giant cunt."
@jsnyder82 said:
@Milkman said:
@JustinNotJason: I'd love to hear your reasoning behind Rachel Maddow being a "giant cunt."
We probably won't ever get his reasoning.
I'm having trouble pointing to one specific instance, since I can't find what I'm looking for on youtube. It's the way she presents the news. She comes off as a smug bitch. Like what's coming out of her mouth can't possibly wrong or contested. She's like the Sean Hannity of her network......alright that might be crossing the line....I'll call her a cunt but calling her Hannity may be an insult.....
I'm voting for Jill Stein. So, yeah have fun picking the lesser of two evil's everyone. I've been saying this for years and nobody listens to me. Look at a parties platform not its candidate. As no matter what they say, the Party's platform is what candidates will follow once they are in office. And my candidate seems very consistent with those clearly stated principles. Does yours?
@Cianyx said:
@imsh_pl said:
There are perfectly viable free market solution to the free rider problem, economic ostricizm being one of the most powerful ones. Give me a specific example of a free rider problem which I'll attempt to solve.
National Defense. Go
Sure!
Let's consider two possibilities: either the majority of people want to pay for defense or they don't.
If the majority of people don't want to pay for national defence then, clearly, the government, being run on a democratic basis, should not provide.
So the fact that they do provide it proves that the majority of people want it (2nd option) and the demand for it is high.
Because the demand is very high (at least half of society) there will be a supplier, and people will voluntarily pay to have their property and lives protected.
Those who don't pay will have to rely on free protection, if anyone offers it, or them defending themselves.
Does that mean that some people will spend money on protection and won't actually need it and others won't spend it at all? Sure. But that's just evaluating your personal risk. This is what insurance is all about: you pay because there is a small chance of very negative consequences.
And nations are entities which are exclusive to the governmental system. They're arbitrary lines in the sand, just like borders. So it's not like you either get defense for everyone or no one.
Besides, you're forgetting what invading other countries is for. You're invading other countries because you want to take over their tax structure, not to take their personal goods. If there's no tax structure, the incentive for a mass scale invasion is greatly diminished, because there's no way to immediately take over everyone's profit (which is what you do if you for example take over the enemy's capital city or capture the president, etc.).
The thing about widescale warfare is that attacks occur indiscriminately. Both society and/or government, when providing defense, do so over stretches of occupied areas and, if an invading state were to attack, I'd highly doubt that they would begin surgically striking unprotected properties. Hence you can see how quickly how a free rider problem can emerge: if enough people bought defense contracts, some protection can be obtained by those who didn't.
A lack of a tax structure doesn't necessarily reduce an incentive for invasion. A nation could be sitting upon or using some profitable natural resource. I don't think the US interfered with all those satellite South American and Middle Eastern countries for their taxes (or lack thereof).
The day I start believing Mitt Romney will be the same day I trust politicians.
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