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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (6537)	12/10/2005 3:32:21 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542154

iMaybe you could expand on what you mean by a legitimate and illegitimate government. You already said it didn't matter for your purposes whether the government is legitimate or not--it's extortion either way, so the definition of legitimate is beside the point. Perhaps it would be more useful if you would tell us why the government doesn't have this moral right. Specifically, what does moral have to do with it. It has the legal right if there's a legally established law that says it does. So what's this about moral right?

To: TimF who wrote (6537)	12/10/2005 7:48:47 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 542154

Simple, I don't think a government has a moral right to take money from you. It may be a practical necessity. For practical reasons I actually support the process, at least to a certain extent. Interesting. It looks like we also have a problem with the term "moral." I'm tempted simply to ask you what you mean by "moral," but I don't think that will get us anywhere. Let me try to different direction. Assuming, for the moment, we are talking only about legitimate governments, then let's look at the provision of education to the citizenry. It's not something that can be accomplished individually. You and I cannot, together or separately, provide the basis for an educated citizenry. So it has to be collectively provided, i. e., public education. Education, in turn, makes it possible for citizens to have access to job opportunity, to understanding health issues, to reading itself and the worlds that opens up, the list could go on at great length. Providing education for its citizens, however badly and unequally it's done, strikes me as a good that governments provide. If that's true, is it not also true that collecting the taxes to provide that education is a good, and that the act of doing so is a moral act. Can you jump into those paragraphs and help me understand what you mean when you say you don't think "government has a moral right to take money"? This might a semantic issue over the meaning of the word legitimate. Maybe you could expand on what you mean by a legitimate and illegitimate government. There is a sociological definition which has always given me trouble which is one that has the consent of the governed. The problem I have with that is (a) it's frequently hard to tell and (b) it also frequently depends on whose talking (observer point of view) and (c) it also varies dramatically by social location. So, rather that get into that morass, I was trying to stay with something I thought we could agree on, which is one that embodies democratic principles, to some substantive degree.