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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (228155)	4/7/2005 2:15:55 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1573847

re: Taxes can have a very minimal social engineering aspect and its usually better that way." I suppose they could in the abstract, but they don't. Cigarettes, liquor, gambling... taxes to support schools, taxes if you own property, higher taxes if you make more money... I could go on and on. It's all social engineering. The existence of a condition is not an effective argument for making that condition more prevalent, not is it an effective argument against reducing the prevalence of that condition. And yes we will probably never eliminate social engineering from out taxes, but the inability to perfectly achieve a goal should not normally be considered an effective argument against a goal. We will never eliminate crime but that doesn't mean we should give up the effort and disband the police, criminal courts, jails, ect. It's all social engineering Its not black and white. Its mostly shades of grey. A flat income tax with no special exemptions and deductions would be just about zero social engineering. A modestly progressive income tax with few exemptions and deductions would be a bit "grey". Our current system is a "darker grey". One with a 99% top rate and exceptions, deductions, and/or different rates for just about every type of activity or for different social, political or religious groups would be "black" or at least close to it. I'm arguing that we shouldn't keep getting "darker", not that any tiny tint of "grey" is an affront to human dignity or that even a few "grey spots" will cause disaster. re: If it was simple and obviously cost effective for the individual consumers of oil, than it would have already happened. There are a lot of vested interests in the status quo. I think if almost anyone but Bush were in the WH, this would be a top priority, not only for the economy but for the "war on terror". I'm not sure you entirely understood my point. I'm not talking about political and legal changes to "make it happen". If the alternatives were "simple and obviously cost effective for the individual consumers of oil", than legal and political changes would not be needed to cause oil use to go down. re: The secondary downside is that the government becomes even more involved in controlling the economy. The further we go down that path the worse the long run results will be. Yeah. But on balance, this issue is so important to the US economy and our security, the government needs to lead. I don't think the importance of an issue is by itself enough to reasonably support large scale government intervention. If the private sector often does things better than the fact that an issue is important might mean we should leave it to the private sector. Also to a large extent determining what is important to an economy should be done by market forces not political decisions. However if you make certain unstated assumptions explicit, than you might have a more solid argument (if the assumptions are accepted). Your argument initially is something like. "This issue is important therefore we need to get the government involved". Alternative forms that make the assumptions more explicit might be. This subject is important All important subjects should be handled by the government Therefore this subject should be handled by the government. This would give you a simple, and very solidly logical argument, but I would disagree with the 2nd premise. Or you might say It is vital to reduce our oil consumption in a relatively short time. There is no way to reduce our oil consumption in a relatively short time without heavy government involvement in this area. Therefore we need heavy government involvement in this area. Again the logic is pretty solid, but I might disagree with the 1st premise. Or maybe you mean something like this Eventually we need to stop out demand for oil from growing. There is no way to slow the growth of demand except through government intervention. Therefore we need government intervention. In this case I disagree with the 2nd premise. I'm not posting this to needlessly complicate things. I do think that it is often important to make explicit assumed premises. If everyone agrees about them then you might not need to make them explicit but if the unstated premises are the heart of your disagreement then you may never get a full understanding of the other person's opinion if you don't make these premises explicit. Tim