| I think that is true, and that we could get a bigger bang for our buck. I also think we should do a better job of sorting out municipal, state, and federal responsibilities,and cure program redundancy, for example. My only point is that we cannot do a proper historical comparison of taxation without noting the differences in costs and quality of service for government funded programs. We now have paved roads,not dirt; we have major capital expenditures for the military, well beyond rifles and cannons; we have state of the art telephone and Internet systems, so that one can get a change of address from the post office on the Web, and incidentally be provided with contact numbers for one's new area; law enforcement has gone well- beyond a modest constabulary, and involves all sorts of forensic science, crime scene analysis, and data base maintenance; and so forth. Government would cost more, even if it were more efficient, than it did a hundred years ago...... |
