(09-17-2018, 07:26 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(09-17-2018, 07:10 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Government has a role in a democratic society for facilitating useful investments that private industry could never do well or equitably. An example is K-12 education. I know, I know --- manor lords and slave-owning planters did train their serfs and slaves ... to be serfs and slaves. We all benefit from mass literacy and competence with arithmetic. Who would pay -- except us all? Civics? The problem is that what might be good for us all (an electorate that can reject demagogues like Hugo Chavez or Donald Trump) is hard to link to any personal gain. We generally think democracy a good thing, as non-democracies almost invariably treat the masses badly. But if you are to rely upon employers to do the education for limited purposes -- serfs and slaves do not vote and must never be allowed to vote if they are to remain serfs and slaves.
There are many other examples, Provide road and airport infrastructure. Maintain standing armed forces. Etc... Fund these through taxation. It doesn't matter if you have no children, owned a car, didn't own a plane, or disagreed with the recent wars. It is traditional to not ask those questions, to tax anyway.
Reasonable enough because vehicles deliver food to your grocer, clothes to your haberdasher, and... You may take a flight sometime. It's hard to determine who gets the biggest benefits. The cost of transportation goes into everything that one buys, and some people buy more stuff than others do.
Quote:One way of looking at money is as a prize, as a reward. If you contribute to a society, you are rewarded by wealth. Regulation by government to make labor safer, to lesson the division of wealth, anything, is viewed negatively. The less regulation done, say many reds,, the better off everyone is supposedly.
Human costs are difficult to calculate. What happens when a poor breadiwnner dies in an industrial accident? Other poor people, typically that breadwinner's family, can go into destitution.
Quote:The other perspective is that of an economist. Money is akin to a lubricant. It exists to replace barter as a means of exchange and distribution. Like a lubricant, it is possible to have to little or too much. The government, as producer, consumer and distributor of money, has as part of its job to distribute money as needed. Giving more than enough to some and nothing to others is not ideal, is not productive.
Societies of extreme inequality might get terribly inefficient or dehumanizing, if not both.
Quote:That is one difference between red and blue. The red do not care about the uneven distribution. They only care the they and those like them get as much as they can. The blue (or many of them) would like to see the system inclusive, all folks contributing, to make the system itself work as well as possible.
It could hardly be simpler.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.