Ahhh, jg, you didn’t anwer my questions….never mind. Far be it from me to be anal-retentive about it… 😉
You have a point – America paid less tax back ‘n the day.
Bearing in mind that the America you are referring to was a sleepy, largely argarian, cultural backwater up until WW1. Where people died on the street for lack of decent medical care, and life expectancy was in the high 40’s due to terrible living conditions, illiteracy..and westward expansion was still in the cultural memory of all concerned…those were the days.
That was then and this is now…more people, more fingers in more pies…as much as we’d all like to return to the ‘good old days ‘ of times past, none us us here could really survive it.
You can’t have the “Greatest Country in the World’ without someone, somewhere, paying for it to be so. By all means, rest on your laurels a while, but Greatness costs.
Sounds to me that what you’re suggesting is a form of Anarchy (or is it Libertarianism? i can never distinguish the two).
Nothing wrong with Anarchy as a politcal form – it may surpise you to know that both Trotsky and Stalin considered it as a potential social framework for Russia after the revoloution, before deciding on socailist communism.
You could do no better than read “The Dispossessed” by Ursula le Guin, for a fascinatiing fictional “what-if?” about how Anarchy would work in the ‘real’ world.
Unfortunately, like a lot of other political systems, its great for the Big Picture, but falls somewhat short of perfect for ‘the devil is in the details’ kind of stuff.
Would you, for instance, be willing to stop paying for hospitals, emergency services, education, military , infrastructure of all kinds, simply because they part and parcel of the Government?
Would you be prepared to live with the consequences of cutting off all forms of socialised help, including any form of government support for you and yours?
Would you be able (willing, I’m sure, but able) to protect your family, loved ones and property from any schmoe who took a liking to it/them, bearing in mind that you would get absolutley no help doing it, other than what you can beg, borrow or steal?
How would you deal with national problems like clean water, emissions, pollution, power supples, when America has reverted basically back into small Nation-States?
How would America grow as a nation, socailly, scientifically, industrially, etc… with no ‘grand plan’ to fall back on?
How would you compete with the rest of the world, when your population is trying to survive childhood without decent, modern, nationwide medical care, or struggling to find a teacher that can educate them to a standard where they can compete outside the borders of the USA? .
Or, most importantly, do you really think people are capable of thriving with no supervision at all?
Maybe I’m too cynical, but I don’t think human nature is altruistic enough to trust everyone to be on the same page, at the same time.
Let’s face it, Westerners are having enough trouble living under captialism without freaking them out by giivng them the ‘total freedom’ to do as they please.
There are a lot of predators out there (and not just non-taxpayers, either) who would do a number on a lot of people, and wthout laws and institutions in place to curb them, you’ll get Anarchy in the derogatory sense, rather than the political sense.
So – if that’s too grim a scenario, what kind of ‘government’ do you allow in order to stop total social decay?
How do you balance needing some form of nationwide oversight with the need to be self-sufficient? How self sufficient can you be and still have meaningful dealings with the rest of the planet? Wheres the perfect balance, the ultimate point of inflection?
I’m not getting at you, i’m genuinely interested.
Like everyone else, I don’t want to pay taxes, and want to change the way things are. But I have difficulty imagining a way that would work – for the benefit of the majority of people and not for the benefit of a minority – that would be radically different from the political system we have now.
