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

To: Sam who wrote (92112)	10/27/2008 3:43:48 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541600

I see in another post you would consider being overcharged by defense contractors "graft" rather than "welfare" ("And "redistribution" to cronies is something else again--graft."). Well, OK. In the end, it effectively amounts to the same thing (or at least an analogous, or, as I wrote above, an "equivalent" thing). And far more expensive. I appreciate your distress over spending boodles inefficiently on the war machine and enriching profiteers in the process. But that's a separate issue with its own dynamics. Sure, you can lump them together as "the same thing" because there are people profiting with tax monies, but you can't justify one by means of the other and you can't effectively analyze them as a pair. Tossing them in the ring together makes as much sense as throwing in government employee salaries and road construction. Not helpful. Edit: The distinction between aircraft carriers and welfare is that the latter's salient purpose is to redistribute. With aircraft carriers, rightly or wrongly, the powers that be perceive that a ship is needed for national defense. The "redistribution" is a side effect. The intent is what is at question--the legitimacy of government taking from one and giving to another deemed by said government to be more worthy.