As long as you mentioned my name... <g>
Ah, and hello there to you, Karen.
A quick response. Tim didn't say that government sometimes gets it wrong, that sometimes it funds things a given set of taxpayers don't approve of. Rather he said "extortion" was at the core of government.
My response is simply to say that the things I listed are at the core and I hardly see them as "extortion."
One can, of course, and I didn't wish to do that in my post with Tim, take the argument to the next level, into an argument about process. And that would be that it's not "extortion" even if I don't like it, so long as there is some sort of minimal democratic accountability for those expenditures. I think, for instance, the money now being paid to the very rich under the misnomer of "tax breaks" is very, very bad policy for which we will all suffer down the road. But I'm still willing to accept the argument that there is sufficient, if little, democratic process still around to make it possible to reverse that down the road.
Minimal. |
