In article , "Don"
wrote:

"paghat" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! wrote

Paghat wrote nothing quoted by Don.

9. End taxes. Pay for services with user fees.
sounds lika a good idea, but it won't work. how would you pay for
schools,
public health programs, etc?

Why should YOU pay to school MY kids?
Once YOU approve of paying for MY needs, YOU will be broke in short order.

A certain cretinish moron with a mandrill's blue ass forged comments in my
name which I never made & you apparently fell for it. I did address this
issue in an actual post of my own, but didn't use the school system as an
example. I asked, instead, how it would serve citizens if the fire
department put out fires only for people who could afford to pay ten
thousand dollars (minimum) for the service, or if the police department
only answered phone calls for paid-up subscribers.

Unfortunately the Libertarian form of conservatism you seem to be
advocating is vastly too utopian & idealistic, which alas has no more
practical applicability than any random Jesus freaks belief that if we'd
all love Jesus it would be a perfect world. I am by & large a civil
libertarian AND progressive, but the broader conservative libertarian
claptrap is simply no more likely to function than ever was the idealised
theory of communism or even of pure anarchy -- all such systems have at
their heart a beauty & perfection that makes sense only when divorced from
humanity's actual nature. There is no chance of it working because people
do not abide by the theory & never care so much about the world as about
their own country, never as much for their country as for their immediate
community, nor as much about their immediate community than their
immediate family, nor as much about their family as about their own
personal SHORT TERM gain, since for the majority immediate always takes
precidence over future outcomes. I want to **** NOW; i want to eat NOW; i
want to sit where you're sitting NOW; I will not help put out your burning
house because mine doesn't need putting out NOW. Everything but Self is up
for grabs without legal systems of penalty & rewards, & taxation to
enforce at least a moderate level of sharing of resources for roads & fire
departments & suchlike, no such sharing would occur, & a caste system
would soon fill the void where law & taxation vanished, with anyone
stepping outside the caste system (outcastes) utterly banished if not
sumarily slaughtered.

When its tested, it fails. We already have pay-as-you-go medicine in
America that permits the poor to drop dead with inadequate care. And even
people who have shitloads of money -- if they have a RARE disease there
won't be treatment advances because there's no profit in medicine for
dozens as there is in medicine for the common ailments of thousands. So
despite having the best theoretical medicine of any country in the world,
Americans do not rank on top for such things as infant mortality. Or
despite that advances in treatment of tropical diseases could save
millions of lives, there is no research into it because in our
pay-as-you-go system, it isn't profitable to treat people who have no way
to indebt themselves to the nth degree.

The Libertarian concept of a self-restrained society which keeps its own
long-term wellbeing uppermost in mind, of a pay-as-you-go society without
taxes or environmental protection laws & whatnot, would lead
instantaneously to a sinister pecking order of the most deadly kind. But
it's fun to play Imaginary Land in which libertarian self-interest of the
One leads logically to a defacto kindly protection of the All, with no
excesses of behavior to use up all resources in a trice & never have
access to them ever again, since everyone knows that'd be stupid in the
long run & simple self-preservation dictates that we all be careful about
such things. The reality is there is no "in the long run" without societal
restraints, because the needs of society as a whole DO NOT match up with
the needs of the individual who never really thinks long-term. For each of
us as individuals there's NOW and MINE, at any cost to the whole.

It's equally fun to have playtime in which communism results in equal
sharing of combined resources out of the goodness of everyone's heart &
everyone's a song-filled Musketeer with blissful tankards of one for all &
all for one. Fat chance that'd ever happen outside of a group of ten with
blood ties or a specialized shared goal, & even one of that jolly ten
would in tme kill one of the nine others over one extra blueberry or a
mating priority. It's also great fun to quote Ann Frank's opinon of
humanity's inherent goodness & try to believe THAT for a while, at the
same time trying to sort out her ashes from those of millions of others.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
See the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com/