Subject:
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Re: Why the founding fathers limited government scope (was Re: Rolling Blackouts
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 11 May 2001 13:41:00 GMT
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Viewed:
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1007 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Christopher L. Weeks writes:
> > That is, the wealthy can afford to pay for better roads, so
> > shipping costs in their area go down, so prices go down to their area, so
> > they save more money.
>
> But the savings they recoup go to pay for better roads.
>
> > Meanwhile, the poor can't afford to pay for better
> > roads, so shipping costs in their area go up, so prices in their area go up,
> > so they have to spend more money.
>
> Which they didn't spend on roads.
These are the types of soundbyte answers I was talking about, since you're
giving them as though they're self-evident and sufficient in themselves,
when in fact they're neither. Your first byte here underscores that the
wealthy will be guaranteed a position to make themselves more wealthy, and
your second byte illustrates how the poor will be guaranteed to remain poor.
Perhaps the money "they didn't spend on roads" was needed to fund such
luxury items as food, clothing, and rent.
> > This is cumulative, of course, with the
> > fact that the impoverished will be decreasingly able to afford to send their
> > kids to better schools, so those kids are more or less guaranteed to make
> > less money,
>
> I would say that the school one attends is less (not more) responsible for
> what one makes than attitude that is learned from parents.
If one's parents were, when they were children, consigned to an
impoverished community and locked into it by a get-what-you-pay-for
education system, then the cycle is preserved through generations. Further,
the educational foundation provided by a good school certainly provides a
better basis for learning and for success later in life. I don't doubt that
parents can and should instill integrity and self-reliance in children, but
I refuse to believe that well-disciplined children from impoverished
communities are as likely to succeed as well-funded children from wealthy
communities.
> > It is impossible to compare the difficulty of fighting a pre-industrial age
> > war (on distant foreign soil) with an organized, modern, technologically
> > advanced, national military force attacking a sporadically organized,
> > privatized, and volunteer army.
>
> Why would the organization be sporadic? And you include privatized as an
> adjective seemingly meant to suggest low quality, but it implies quite the
> opposite to me.
How many tanks can Microsoft afford to build? How many stealth fighters
can Disney afford to maintain? Unless there is a formal coalition between
private military organizations (and I can't wait to see the KKK-funded
military machine!), there is no way that a private army can realistically be
maintained at a level competitive with the state military of a powerful
foreign government. Further, would you trust the Microsoft War Machine? We
can't go one week on LUGNET without someone (often quite reasonably) griping
about some aspect of Gates Hegemony.
> The folks that I know (mostly, knew in the past) who were
> private militia members took their role very seriously. Most of them were US
> Army trained and more martially responsible than most soldiers with whom I
> have discussed military life.
No one joins a private milita without "taking their role very seriously,"
but that doesn't make them credible or capable members of a private military
force, if only because they'll never be able to afford to compete with state
military organizations. In any case, I'd love to see the data on this study
of a no-doubt representative sample, both of professional soldiers and of
militia members.
Dave!
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