Thursday, December 09, 2004
Random Topic Rant
Quasi-topical from Caljunket. It's only quasi-topical there, so I'm mentioning it here.
Tommaso Sciortino has no objection to "getting money from some people and giving it to other people." None. At all. So if the government went randomly taking money from people and giving to other people for no particular reason, TS wouldn't really mind, beyond, perhaps, "there's something better they could do with their time." (If that's a mischaracterization of his argument, he apparently wasn't reading what I was writing which begged him to at least consider such an action as a drawback) The assumption behind this statement appears to be "your property is yours only at the convenience of the government. Whenever the government thinks of something "better" to do with it, it becomes the government's."
Well, actually, not even that. Taking money from some people and giving it to others is not even viewed as a drawback, so it doesn't even matter if the government can think of something "better" to do with it. At worst, doing so is neutral.
The property rights argument isn't stated explicitly, usually, because most people take it for granted. "If you want to take people's money, you'd better be doing something good with it." Sure, we'd all like to help people, but it's not like the money to help people comes from trees. If it did, and the government had infinite capacity to help people without hurting others, we'd all say "Yay, let's see some more government programs!" But that's simply not the situation.
All I'm asking from folks is that when you discuss government spending/redistribution programs, you stop to consider that doing so requires what is, effectively, theft, and that we should have to justify any such government action against that moral drawback. Note the difference between this position and "Never, ever, ever let the government spend money," which seems to be how it is interpreted.
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