Discuss amongst yourselves...

[RicodJour]

R

[Adam Weiss]

Our goverment is driving middle Americans into anarcho-capitalism.

We have two parties, both ignorant of the needs of the vast American middle class. One of them (Republican) asks big corporations how they can use the tax dollars of middle Americans to help them, and just maybe along the way get them to employ poor people who don't pay taxes. The other (Democrat) asks poor people who don't pay taxes how best they might hand them the taxpayers money.

Nobody is asking the question FDR did. Mister American taxpayer: how can I use your tax dollars to serve you paying the poor to do it?

It's all about payment for services rendered. If I pay you money, you provide me with a service. This is the case in private industry, and it

-should be the case- in government. Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood that when he created the Tennessee Valley Authority to bring electricity to rural parts of the country, and when he put people to work on flood control projects, swamp drainage, fire-fighting, road building, etc. These programs provided average, middle class taxpayers with services they didn't have before - and also provided work and a hard-earned paycheck to (and tax revenue from) the poor.

FDR's successors in the Democrat and Republican parties alike have lost sight of the notion of payment for services rendered. They've turned the programs FDR designed into overweight bureaucracies that seldom provide the services to people that were originally intended, and never do so in an effecient manner. And worse, they've established communistic programs like welfare whose function is to dole out money and expect nothing in return.

It's no wonder that many have completely lost faith in the US government. I say so even though I do hold out hope....

[Adam Weiss]

This is Don's view of the world, in a nutshell. He's in it for himself and noone else; don't let him try to fool you about it.

And keep it for record if he accuses me of lying about him when I bring it up later.

[marcenmoni]

It's funny the article cites current day Somalia and an obscure period in medieval Iceland as two 'working' examples.

Jesting aside, it's a nice idea, but it can't work, or at least not for very long. The system is best suited for an agricultural population, but even with that base it would more than likely devolve into a feudal state/clan state, etc. As some people, groups or companies acquire more wealth and the ability to purchase 'power' and control a larger, if not exclusive, range of services, (particularly a company with private militia AND insurance) you've substituted 'public state' for 'private state'. It's a natural course for businesses/competitors to merge (or buy out) and get bigger. Microsoft is a classic example, in only 20 years. There's also the problem that it's highly unlikely you'd ever convert 6 billion people to the system, meaning you'd have one nation operating like this, while most others retain governments. Which means you leave yourself open to invasions, either armed or unarmed (by massive immigration or by economic buy out).

M

[zenboom]

Without knowing many details of history, I recall a number of Europe's colonial ventures where run by private companies. I gather the colonists were not much better off than indentured labour. The companies controlled all supplies and any use of local resources [ land and all .] Those that didn't follow their companies regulation faced the consequence of either execution,corporal punishment, imprisonment or being turned out in the wilderness with no means. Thus they had 'private rule' and were not anywhere as free as the citizens at home.

Although constitutional, democratic and other governments suffer from corruption and abuse, I do feel they at least offer a starting point for us to achieve just society. This is surely preferrable to the old 'might is right' rule, where the toughest buggers do whatever they want at the expense of any they manage to abuse. I say once the social darwinist types experience this themselves, that they'll lose their enthusiasm for 'survival of the fitest' as a social virtue.

Sure, one can choose to be free by going off into isolation from society and making ones own rules. [Yet space is limited and people are mobile, so sooner or later one would have to manage some form of interaction...if only as crude as roaring and beating your chest ;)] But bear in mind that everything you take with you is a product of 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 or

100,000 years of social developement: self-cosciousness, conceptions, language, mores, common sense, technique and technology.

You may choose to take as much information, equipment and materials as you have the means to buy and transport, yet can you replace them as they are used up? Bear in mind that that life will be limited by the relatively insignificant means of the invidual. You may be free of society, but there's still physics, geology, climate, ecology and biology, until the day you die :\ It will be up to you to do without or replace what societies have provided by specialized labour and economic exchange: food, clothing, shelter, medicine etc. [ just these basic material needs should keep you spinning, 25 hours a day! :}] and everything else. Well... G*d speed.

As the world faces an uncertain future, with political instabillity,population escalation, resource depletion, climate change... what are the likely scenarios one must face and what are our choices? At this point it seems unlikely that a sufficient number will take conscious action to change the behaviours that are leading us down this road. So... how, where and to what degree will individuals co-operate to survive, to preserve our shared achievements and to progress in the face of mounting challanges?

-- R'zenboom

[Night_Seer]

I'd suggest you just give up on that one real quick. Its like a broken record. Old codgers rarely change their tune. :)

[Kris Krieger]

Adam Weiss wrote in news: [e-mail]:

*BINGO*

You hit the bull's eye there.

If you work legally, you pay taxes. If you only make $15K a year, you pay taxes.

The more money you make, the more tax writeoffs you usually get to claim - therefore, it seems to me that there is an inverse relationship between one's salary, and the actual percentage of that salary that gets taken out in taxes.

Yup.

When I worked for the gov.t (quit back in '91 but I suspect things haven;t changed much), people making decent salaries (enough to buy a nice, large house) would take trips to the stock room, pick up a few bits for the office and then take a whole armlod of stuff to bring home - i.e., steal. Pens, paper, staplers, colored pencils and markers, post-its, folders, floppy disks, printer paper, and etc. and so on and so forth.

It was just dusgusting. An ordering system was finally put in place because of the thousands of $$ lost to theft - which made it very difficult to get actual needed office supplies (quotas and so on). But theives will always find ways around any system - it's the honest people who always end up bearing the brunt of rules and regulations. Honest people don't need to be scrutinized - and dishonest people always find ways to continue being dishonest.

I don't. I assume we'll end up with a theocracy that will finish the destruction of the middle class, and take the nation into some weird sort of peasant:aristocracy type of class system.

**IF** something better happens, it will be a pleasant surprise. But as the saying goes, Even if you hope for the best, always prepare for the worst.

I've considered moving to Australia...