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Gene Wolfe's Politics

Jeff Wilson · 27 Mar 2009, 05:18 · from 2009-March.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:18:01 -0500
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe's Politics
In-Reply-To: <1f7617370903261357t2d44cb69r92d8359be7df579f at mail.gmail.com>
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>
	<1f7617370903261357t2d44cb69r92d8359be7df579f at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <49CC6189.4040502 at io.com>

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> 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.

Currently you don't get police protection in the US, only the 
_possibility_ of police protection, and there's no refunds or recourse 
if they don't respond.

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

What if you don't care for pizza? Or find much of the services society 
provides unnecessary, unreliable, or even invasive?

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >

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