The American Right and Anti-Intellectualism

[Mr Khan]

badgenome said:

Mr Khan said:

Unfunded tax cuts? They definitely increase the deficit. Just like any entity, the Federal Government has a series of constant expenses, spending that is ongoing, and the best way to get further into debt is to have ongoing expenses and yet your revenue stream dries up, which is what happens to troubled businesses all the time, except this time the Federal Government did so willingly.

A real debate would be the efficacy of supply-side economics, or rather, is it better for money to trickle down than to trickle up? Welfare money is just as good as that extra $20,000 you get to keep because of a lower capital gains tax, but who spends it more effectively?

That may well be the debate you want to have, but I find it morally repugnant to take someone's $20,000 and transfer it to someone else because Top Men have decided that it's better for the economy. For all the flak free marketeers take about supposedly worshipping the market, at least we don't believe that theft is justified if it's economically beneficial.

I think therein lies the real problem, not whether or not people (or just conservatives) are too stupid nowadays. There seems to be a genuinely irreconcilable difference in philosophy, and thanks to centralization of power, we can't have the states acting as laboratories of democracy to find out what works best and, more importantly, to let people live as they please. The leftist Borg won't allow it.

The inalienability of the right to property (or the definition of what is property which you have rights over) does seem to be at the root of the debate. A side rant of mine has been for a significant revision of intellectual property definitions as well as what a corporate entity can and can't directly own.

If we truly desire a better world, however, somewhere, at some point, the government has to step in. If we value a free market system, such a system first needs to work in a way that is humane, and this can only occur if all of the actors have the right values instilled in them, which would require State action on education towards righteousness and humanity. If we were to make the rights for individuals to retain their property absolute, this would lead to infringements on other rights in the ensuing anarchy.