so what does it mean when someone says they are obeying god if that is not part of religion?
Ask them what it means, I imagine they can account for themselves better than I can. Humans are sinful, thats my answer.
No. They want to set up a safety net for people to fall back on in times of trouble. They have no sinister motives besides ignorance.
Hahahh.
Yes, but unfortunately, this is only one aspect of statism, albeit a very popular one. The Democrats are trying to make everyone a socialist, yet in essence, so are Republicans. The Democrats push the large state agenda where everyone “deserves” wealth, yet the incomprehensible disconnect between the wealth they receive and where they get it from is sad, as government produces nothing but only steals from those who do produce. As for the Republican side of things, many, many Republicans look to the government–specifically the federal government–to provide security on police state levels, whereby many of them even want our morality regulated (this is a quotation from one hardcore Republican I spoke with earlier). These people are ok with things such as the Patriot Act, and they’d be fine with having armed guards quartering every room of the house. The police and military are practically gods in the eyes of these people. It’s scary. But if you ask me, I’d say the Democrat party is worse than the Republican party due to a complete lack of financial consideration. They act as though they truly believe money grows on trees and scarcity is non-existent, and that the only thing coming in between them and their “deserved” guvment check is the rich business owners.
many people have business because someone built infrastructure. infrastructure is not magic in that it’s somehow productive if built privatly yet not productive if built publicly. not many people don’t use public roads or do business with people thatdon’t use public roads and infrastructure, so i figure it’s logical to say public roads are deemed more productive than not using public roads. people are surely willing to buy real estate near public roads and start business such as gas stations.
Ah, a restatement of the ol’ Elizabeth Warren argument.
The argument only works if it were impossible to have private roads and private infrastructure, all of which is paid for use.
Since it is possible, and the public roads only exist because of government monopoly, it’s a less than convincing argument. Besides which, even under the present system, you pay for use in the way of taxes. Thus you don’t owe for use as if infrastructure usage became a debt. You’ve paid for use, you’re square. You owe others nothing.
The US Democratic Party is too big an organization, made of several parts seeking several objectives, and therefore it’s very problematic to boil down an entire agenda to any specific single goal.
But it’s fair to say that a lot of what the Democratic party elected officials try to accomplish is something like that, whether they explicit express this intention through their rhetorics or they only reveal it by their political action.
And “on welfare” and “as many people as possible” are always difficult things to define. That may sound good as part of an inflamatory speech, but carry very little practical meaning.
A more precise assessment would be that in the current political situation of the US, the general democrat gets his electoral edge over a general republican adversary largely by shifting the perception of his constituency towards the potential benefits and away from the potential costs these constituents would get from a more or less general increment on government welfare programs.
I think such statement would be acceptable regardless of ideological favoritisms.
Of course, such perceptions need not be realistic for such a general Democrat strategy to work. People vote based on their perceptions, not on objective hard facts. Their perception may be more or less related to the facts, but it’s usually easier to manipulate perceptions than underlying facts.
And a major way to do so is to getting lots of people directly assisted by some welfare program, making perceived benefits very clear, while concealing the real costs the best way possible, which is not that hard to do given the dispersion and non-specificity of their manifestation as the different forms of taxation.
Even though a general strategy for a general republican would somehow need to deal with this general democrat strategy of “spreading welfare presence”, and the republican rhetoric may try to give the impression of “cutting taxes (costs)” in some general sense, it’s an error to assume that this necessarily means that republicans are seeking for contractions of government overall expenditures.
That’s hardly the case, since professional politicians have enormous vested interests in increasing government expenditures on the sectors where they can leverage political power from increased expenditures.
If they don’t do it, they won’t find much political success.
Welfare programs generally, though that is not always the case, form a major Democrat source of political exploitation.
And welfare costs, either in terms actual budget or in terms of perceived negative incentives towards productivity, are often understood by a significant fraction of the given constituency of a more conservative persuasion, therefore many republicans try to appeal to them, while trying to conceal the costs of their own political machines, which are generally of a more secretive nature. On the federal level, common partners of republicans in recent times have been the military-industrial compex and the energy sector, which are usually among the major beneficiaries of shifted welfare resources, rather than the politically disorganized tax-payer. But these alliances also change.
The general public perceptions of these political costs oscillate with time, and so a party may be prominent for years until it is surpassed by the other.
Where did the money come from in the first place to build the “Infrastructure”? It sure as hell didn’t come from government. I don’t see how people persisently fail to grasp this very simple concept. Government doesn’t create wealth. Anything that comes from government was funded by productive citizenry.
The goal of the government is to increase revenue and sustain itself. The politicians and the state in general just uses ethical issues as justification for spending money and to gain votes. The other mechanism at work at least in the UK is that they try and use taxation to reduce costs by manipulating the population while simultaneously over spending. example they spend £100 billion on health care but have high taxes on cigarettes apparently because it costs the NHS billions £ per year, due to the health risks associated with tobacco. When realy the tax on tobacco is just another revenue stream that due to the health considerations has become a good candidate for high taxes because the topic has a popular negative sentiment.
So the goal of welfare fits nicely in to the framework because it is popular with the voters and creates people dependent on the state which further sustains it.
That pretty much sums it up.
The thing is that government or state is an abstraction for what political and bureaucratic creatures are doing as a group.
And they are seldom doing anything as a group.
They are each fighting for their own prominence. Sometimes they form temporary or persistent alliances, but that’s all.
Some may feel they can benefit from proposing or pushing a welfare or a civil rights bill, others may feel they can benefit from opposing it.
This is all very circumstantial. They need to juggle the interests of their political backers, their allies, their constituents (if they are elected officials), and also need to make it harder for their direct adversaries.
Yes I agree, the individuals in the state or the employees of the state operate for their own self interest primarily, but collectively as a “company ethos” they try to generate revenue in order to sustain the state, which is ultimately a part of their self interest as they are employees. If state employees are against welfare or big spending programs of any kind, they get a lot of resistance from the other state employees who are in favour of it. This same mechanism is at work when people try and cut the state, the employees of the state resist the cuts as it goes against their self interest. But it is still possible, in conversation at least, to refer to the state collectively, especially as it is a unique sort of entity that collectivises self-interest.
Yes, of course there’s some corporative culture and protectionism among bureaucrats, members of parties and sometimes even between political figures from opposing sides, something which becomes specially noticeable when one group is threatened of extinction.
But there’s also checks and balances. When the growth of the state-like apparatus is particularly favorable to an specific political machine, the other interest groups will find ways to limit it. They understand that after a certain point, if a group controls too much power it is in position to take over all others and establish an hegemonic rule.
Like every mafia cartel, it doesn’t generally over expand indefinetly due to mutual self-interested control between the groups.
Where did the money come from in the first place to build the “Infrastructure”? It sure as hell didn’t come from government. I don’t see how people persisently fail to grasp this very simple concept. Government doesn’t create wealth. Anything that comes from government was funded by productive citizenry.
government is simply the citizens, the citizens form the government the same way citizens form a business, a government is a form of business.
mcdonalds the legal fiction did not create any wealth either, as people acted to create the wealth and mcdonalds simply gets funds invested in it by real people. the legal fiction itself is not a actor that created anything.
there has yet to be a government started and run by simply by legal fiction with no human involvement.
wealth for both private and public comes from people, not legal fictions, but both organizations public and private can affect future wealth creation.
interstate 5 has not reduced the wealth of everyone who has used interstate 5, many have created more wealth by use of interstate 5 and i’m sure there is a net increase in wealth from the existance of interstate 5, and this increase in wealth is there whether or not there is public or private ownership of the interstate 5.
How can you possibly be sure of that? If I robbed you and used the money to build a sand castle on a popular beach, was there net increase in wealth? Look at all the joy people had when they saw our sand castle!
a net increase in wealth can be the result of interaction that voluntary, involuntary, and/or a mix of the two. increase of wealth is not a matter how how moral that increase in wealth is.
how many farmers only work with animals that volunteered to be on the farm, volunteered to be butchered, volunteered to work the land? how many children volunteered to do all the work they are given in a family and approve of how the wealth the children generate is used?
how are you defining and measuring wealth?
all the plant farmers, at least. Anyway, animals have rights when they petition for them. It seems like you think a bull gets wealthier when he is slaughtered.
its hard to say since the government prohibits them from selecting a new household or creating their own.
wealth, assets , resources, human and material capital, access. one way to measure is interstate 5 and it’s traffic and trade volume volume vs some nature trail and it’s volume of trade. there is more wealth interacting on interstate 5 than a bike trail for instance.
plants nor animals benefit from the wealth people force them to create for them. i was saying a farmer can gain wealth by killing his animal and trading it, it is wealth generated by a mix of the animal and the farmer.
government does not prohibit children from starting their own households. there can always be a black market for this.
i think parts of government have stemmed from parenting practices and heiarchy, i doubt government happens independantly of family. bigger government happend after family government. having the 21 and over males be the only one to vote must have stemmed from families where head’s of household were 21 and over males and that family governing was taken to town and society governing. in places like the church i know i have seen heiarchies where children are supposed to be the lowest and obey whatever the father says, and older males have church governing power. so depends on what it means by the government, as families, churches, tribes, and whatnot have created definitions where some are to govern the lives of others and others are to submit to those that give themselves the power to govern.
well I dont consider a traffic jam on the interstate to be wealth. Using your definition of wealrh its easy to posit that s tyrannical government could spur massive increases in wealth, Darth Cheney could send his legions to mandate that everyone build catapults and launch rocks east, trillions of tons of rocks, all over the world, hurtling through the air, its so much wealth, can you even imagine?
I would rather bike to work on a nature trail than risk my life at 70 mph in a 2 ton missile surrounded by other multi-ton missiles. So I guess I am saying I dont care if a tyrant can make a bunch of useless “wealth” I want quality of life. I would even have went with material goods, but traffic? Lol ok go have your tyrant, see how much traffic you get when theres a curfew.
does he gain if I kill his animal and steal it, and fix him some rib tips a few years later? Or would that be a loss of wealth?
You sound awfully confused on either “government,” “black market,” or both.
thanks for your idle speculations.