Because I don't see how property is equal to life. You're just equating the two with one another without any sort of explanation whatsoever.Originally Posted by Raistlin
And evidently you need to brush up on your Constitutional history. 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.
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.
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.I never said that they don't deserve to live. I said that they don't deserve anyone else's life. I'm not entitled to anything from you that you yourself don't give willingly. If a poor person with AIDS wants to ask for free treatment, the owners of the treatment are free to give it by choice. But once anyone who proclaims the need for something is entitled to it, you have communism - the most anti-life, anti-good, anti-progress form of government ever conceived.
That would sustain it for a few years, not indefinitely. After that time period expires, what would you propose?Because we have more invested in the armed forces than we need solely for our protection.
Er. If they don't have a job, they can't earn money. Are you proposing to let them starve? It sounds like it.No - I'm saying they're incapable of earning money. Welfare and unemployment doesn't allow poor people to earn money; it takes the money from those who have earned it and gave it to the people who haven't.
We didn't have socialist systems before the 1930s? Five acres and a mule is socialism. You're using post hoc ergo propter hoc logic here. We have poverty because the amount of people in urban areas has grown drastically since the turn of the century, and no longer can people simply make food for themselves, because real estate is at a premium. It used to be that anyone who wanted land could have it, and thus we didn't have a poverty problem. Nowadays, that's not the case.We didn't have these socialist systems until the 30s/40s. Under a non-statist government, we had less a percentage of poor people then.
You're using a slippery slope argument on "the ends justify the means." The government has the power to tax people because it is delegated by the Sixteenth Amendment. It does not have the power to seize anything it wants, because that power is not delegated to it by anything, and the only thing that would make it acceptable is if the citizens were to vote for such an amendment.
But it would still cost poor people money that they didn't have. I see no evidence that vouchers work; I have some statistics that I'll quote later.Ever since public education, the US has been dropping in educational standards. We're now...what, 25th in the world? With our economic power, that's ridiculous. Privitization mean competition - which increases quality and decreases price. With privitized education("public" education is NOT free education), we would be getting BETTER education for LESS money - and it would be getting better and cheaper all the time.
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.
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.
