01-31-2009, 09:07 PM
Quote:Well, yes. A slave loses all freedom and income. Since I have only lost 1/2 my income and freedom, then I am 1/2 a slave.
We've been here before, and anyone interested can certainly look up the old argument. Needless to say, I find this to be not only ridiculous, but insulting to the brutal historical experience of slavery, which is so many times more horrifying than income taxes that it seems a cruel joke to even suggest it.
Quote:Right, and as I said before people are habituated to maintain the status quo.
A status quo where the vast majority of people were vastly less free than today.
Quote:Which of the founding fathers chased Brigham Young to Utah?
Obviously, none of them. However, my point is that the history of the US has trended strongly from less liberty for all to more, not the other way around, as you seem to believe, or at least imply on a regular basis.
Quote:How exactly?
By establishing a strong executive, with an army, a banking system, a public debt, and all the pragmatic trappings of real government, including the powers of taxation and regulation that you complain so loudly about. That is to say, he (and many others, of course) diverted the course of US government from a Jeffersonian experiment to the nation you see before you.
Quote:Correct, but it also meant that the representatives were "of the people" rather than a privileged class beholden to special interests.
I'm all for the argument that politicians in the US are "beholden" to special interests, but they are not a privileged class, at least not most of them. They are elected representatives.
Quote:The argument that the colonists had was that they felt their wealth was being siphoned away to be spent frivolously as King George decided. Is it any different now, with rampant redistribution programs, excessive pork and earmarks?
Yes. As I already said, you *elect* your government. What it does, it does with the sovereignty of the people of the United States, not of a monarch, not of another country's parliament, nothing but Americans deciding for Americans. It's your collective choice, and if you don't like it, elect better people, and if that isn't enough, your freedom of exit is unfettered.
(This is, of course, leaving aside the argument that King George, and Parliament, were not "siphoning" particularily much, were offering the world's best free military protection, and were not "frivolously" spending on anything in particular. However, that particular piece of American mythology is the topic of a whole other thread.)
-Jester