Nick Makiaveli, on 18 February 2012 - 05:02 PM, said:
Well believe me, I know more than a few of those (but in fairness, I know more than a few empty headed people from most political backgrounds).
That's why I'm frustrated with politics. You get this false dichotomy between the far left, who intrude with government where greater society doesn't need it, and the far right, who think there should be no government. Too few exist between.
Can't I love my space program and civil rights?!
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That tax has been repealed and reinstated a bunch of times. It gets targeted a lot when opposing taxes is popular, and in hard times for budgets, gets reinstated, but I'll get to that.
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That you'll have to elaborate on more before I could comment. Could you be more specific?
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Ugh, the creationism weirdos...
Yeah, you get those people who pipe up over trying to put creationism in the classroom all the time, but never gain traction.
Even if they did, they wouldn't be allowed to remove evolution, and even then, there would be fairly strict limitations on what could be taught. For instance, if a public school began teaching the Bible as science, it would violate the 14th Amendment, go to court, and laws would be changed. As it is, pretty much all efforts at putting any kind of creationism or intelligence design in the classroom have failed, almost everywhere.
The reason they've failed is because the courts are pretty strict on this point. Just look at the specific cases.
http://en.wikipedia....cation_programs
Every effort to even specifically teach intelligent design has been ruled unconstitutional. The only efforts that have even withstood even legal scrutiny are things like the Louisiana law, which only makes very weak, very tepid statements about "teachers helping students with the confusion of controversial issues", and even that's creating a firestorm.
Even if Kansas could have gotten their laws past the courts, and we know they wouldn't have because of every other case on the subject, you'll note what happened: the voters eventually shot it down. Governing laws by public opinion, and constraining what they can do doesn't just work in theory, but in practice.
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You make a fair point, and I do partly agree, but going back to the phone tax, consider the other side of that.
Taxes get unpopular when they're really not needed; we have a big anti-tax movement here, and that's good to have people be skeptical, but this just isn't the late 90s anymore. States aren't shoveling money from huge surpluses back at people.
The simply reality is that right now, budgets are hurting, badly. They really have been for about a decade. Were the climate different, and states facing huge surpluses, we'd probably be screaming to get rid of complicated taxes, but K-12 schools are starving, public employees are getting laid off, college tuition is getting hiked (15% for Appalachian State last year; trust me, that hurts), roads aren't being maintained, or even properly treated in the winter, police forces are starving out officers for pay and still can't hire enough, and it's because of a combination of economic crisis and bottomed out income taxes, for almost everyone. So states find ways to get the money to survive, since they can't seem to with traditional taxes. I've seen a lot of new off the wall fees and taxes come in during this period.
It's a dysfunctional system, with a lot of cognitive dissonance, but that's the fault of the fact that there just isn't enough money in the economy, for the public or anyone. Again, this is a matter of public opinion, for which there seems to be, again, an odd cognitive dissonance. People get up in arms over changes to income taxes to pull in more revenue, yet a cut to sales taxes here in NC is proving to be relatively unpopular, because people understand that what's an insignificant reduction in the price of goods (a few cents off most purchases) has come at the cost of their childrens' schools going bankrupt.
In short, half the problem is that we can't seem to figure out what we do and don't want for taxes and spending in the first place.
Beyond that, however, would we even want to simplify and concentrate taxes, even if things were simple?
Isn't a pluralistic tax system really advantageous? I mean, sure, some taxes, like gas taxes, cause as many problems as they solve, as they mostly hit the poor, but beyond that, taxing a variety of things for revenue, instead of just jacking one tax through the roof, means you collect money pluralistically, so you collect it from everyone, instead of slapping just one group. That doesn't seem like a bad thing to me.
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Roads aren't exactly a welfare program, but to answer your question, they didn't get built before governments. The first roads that I know of were natural, and largely already there, consisting of using rivers in Egypt for travel. Egyptians didn't much care for traditional roads, iirc, since their entire civilization was just dotted along the Nile anyways.
After that, however, you start getting the first real road systems, which is really what you care about, not individual roads.
The first that I know that we know the builders of were in Persia and Rome, and both were vast systems built by the government. The Persian roads were constructed under the direction of Darius I, and the Roman roads were construct by and for the military to move troops around, much like the US Superhighway System was in the 1950s.
So yeah, roads have been government operated for about as long as roads have existed in any significant way, and really, does it surprise you?
What other body would have the centralized power to operate a road system? Certainly it's not something you could do effective with the private sector; could you imagine trying to build a vast system of roads by COMMITTEE?! That's effectively what you'd have if you had a whole bunch of different private people trying to build roads. You'd never be able to agree on how to set it all up. Then you'd have problems of responsibility for maintenance, different standards for materials and width, and FORGET having an agency out there who'd be willing to map it all (not quite so easy before satellites, or even automobiles). Even if you could find a private agency who'd map it all, you'd probably have competing companies paying them off not to include the other guys' roads, so that they could profit from theirs.
It'd just be a mess. So yeah, roads? Pretty much always governmental, and always have been.
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Majorities help in votes, but not arguments
Believe it or not, there are many, including myself, who agree with you. However, it's not just as simple as removing all the laws and expecting people to behave. We've lived in societies with few laws, and what happens is that powerful people use that dearth of power to become powerful and abuse others because nothing stops them anymore.
However, with sufficient human advancement, this shouldn't be the case, and many futurists have suggested as much.
The idea of a society where people are so universally decent, and non-foolish, that we don't have to restrict behavior, is one I'd like to see. In the here and now, we don't have such a system, so without laws, things would just fall apart, plain and simple, however, we do both agree on one thing: The key to attaining such a system is for society to start putting more emphasis on personal responsibility, which isn't going to happen if government keeps trying to dictate every little thing we do down to the day to day minutiae. That has to stop.
Edited by Catamount, 20 February 2012 - 10:17 AM.