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The Tenth Amendment does not say that the government has no power to tax its citizens, because the Sixteenth Amendment expressly gives the government the power to levy an income tax.
The 18th amendment also outlaws the sale of alcohol...that doesn't mean it's a great thing.
How can I have the right to my life if the government has a continual claim on it? It's contrary to any definition of freedom.
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And the government isn't taking whatever it wants, whenever it wants. Elected representatives are carrying out the will of the people they represent taking the amount of money the masses want them to take. It's the will of the people because they had to vote to approve the Sixteenth Amendment to be passed for it to become a part of the constitution.
Oh yes, so the approval of the Patriot Act is also just, by that logic. As were the Sedition Acts of 1800 and 1920.
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That would sustain it for a few years, not indefinitely. After that time period expires, what would you propose?
Where are you pulling this from?
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I fail to see how giving people's tax money to people who can't afford to do things necessary to subsist equates to communism. I suppose you can loosely term welfare a form of socialism if you're using the American Conservative definition of socialism, but just because the government employs a socialist program to give people the right to life it explicitly guarantees its citizens doesn't make it a socialist government. A socialist government would be one which took away all income its citizens earned and redistributed it equally amongst all of its citizens.
It's communism, by any definition. Socialism is window-dressed communism. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." It forfeits the right of the individual, forfeits freedom, and forfeits any claim to benefit the "common good." What is the common good? What is the public?
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But it would still cost poor people money that they didn't have.
Then they earn it, or go without.
First off, I don't agree with public education or welfare. How can the government force me to finance something that I don't agree with and that doesn't benefit me?
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U.S. education standards are dropping horrendously because we throw away all our capital preparing students for worthless assessment tests that serve as worthless identifiers of how well the student does on the worthless assessment test. Not only are these assessments a waste of time and money, and not only do they cause teachers to waste valuable class time preparing students for the worthless tests that could be spent teaching the students things they're actually going to use in real life, but the implementation is ass-backwards. Instead of getting more money when its students are struggling, a school gets less money, which means those schools' already poor standards are going to go even further into the gutter, further dragging the national average down.
Partially, but why were the assesment tests made in the first place?
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Instead of throwing so much public cash into the developmental black hole of achievement testing, the government should be sending all that money straight into the pocketbooks of teachers, which would incite more and better people to enter the profession. Getting rid of the equally worthless education major, which teaches people how to teach out of a textbook instead of the actual knowledge they'll be teaching their students, would eliminate a major that attracts some of the poorest students in college, and also eliminate the source of the ridiculous "education majors are more desirable than majors in their area of expertise" bias which plagues our institutions for now. I've ranted about this for pages elsewhere, go here for something three years old and here for something more current.
Or just privatize schools entirely, which would cut taxes dramatically and make schools competitive, which means prices would drop, teacher salaries would increase, and education quality would increase.
