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

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (91027)	10/21/2008 11:21:16 AM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 541604

I "reassert" that fairness standards can be applied in policy making...and that they are. I never questioned that. People apply whatever frame to things that they choose. Some people choose to frame everything as "about them," for example. What I said at the top of this discussion and that I will "reassert" <g> is that public policy issues other than use of the commons are not inherently about fairness and that intentionally imposing a fairness paradigm is not helpful/constructive. Fairness is an emotional distraction that is inefficient and unnecessary. Just looking for trouble, IMO. Simply put, considerations specific to cigarettes made it "fairer" to impose that tax and the policy makers and most Americans understood that. Baloney. Sin taxes came into being because they were an easy way to get revenues. Sinners had neither persuasion nor political clout on their side. If you see fairness in it, you're looking at it in retrospect.