Gene Wolfe's Politics

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 26 Mar 2009, 20:57 · from 2009-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:57:27 -0700
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe's Politics
In-Reply-To: <9120.72.171.0.139.1238100412.squirrel at brunians.org>
References: <958496.76164.qm at web180202.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
	<1523.72.171.0.142.1238077325.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<BLU120-W165E063BB36FDA170696F786910 at phx.gbl>
	<2509.67.142.130.16.1238095509.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<1f7617370903261242r3fbdec07scd2f4b38ee8b5a29 at mail.gmail.com>
	<6055.72.171.0.139.1238099237.squirrel at brunians.org>
	<1f7617370903261332k2dbe29fah1dbfa89734131259 at mail.gmail.com>
	<9120.72.171.0.139.1238100412.squirrel at brunians.org>
Message-ID: <1f7617370903261357t2d44cb69r92d8359be7df579f at mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 1:46 PM,  <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:

>> I'm talking about the gummint going bankrupt, silly boy.
>
> It's pretty much bankrupt up here.
>
> Still a lot better place to live than where you are.

I'd hate it where you are. I like cities. You know - civilization,
in the root sense of the word.

>>> Every penny of taxes is robbed at gunpoint from a citizen, mind you.
>
>> If you take that as your given libertarianism almost makes sense. However,
>> it isn't a very exact description of how taxation works.
>
> Do you really believe this?

Absolutely. The only people from whom taxes are extracted by force
are the anti-social few who don't pony up voluntarily.

Society is like a bunch of people who decide they want pizza on a
Friday night. Everybody chips in a few bucks.  You can argue about
how to fairly divide the cost -- by who eats most, or who can afford
most, or just even-Steven, or what -- and you can argue about how
much and what kind of pizza to order (and there's always the one
guy holding out for takeaway curry), but if you want to be part of
the pizza party, you chip in.

That's taxes. Simple as that. Instead of "pizza," you get things
like "roads" and "police protection," but the general idea applies.

> Come on, man. I know you got blinders to make
> a carriage horse proud, but seriously.

Ahem. This is the guy who complains about incivil discussion?

> Whatever you say, white man.

See above. When you can't say something substantive, you
fall back on insult.

>> Therefore, the best-run society is that which does the most
>> to compensate for the imperfections of the individual humans
>> that actually implement it. That seems to me to be a large,
>> inefficient bureaucracy where nobody has the power to do
>> too much.
>
> On your dime....

That's right. On my dime. I got no problems with chipping in
my share for the services society provides.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net