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Politics : Actual left/right wing discussion -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (8758)	12/5/2010 8:39:58 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 10087

Tribes function according to a set of laws enacted by each tribe according to the culture and the elders decide. Today we use democracies and representatives decide. Largely true but entirely irrelevant. The fact that we have governments doesn't provided any support at all for the idea that we should have high taxes and extensive redistribution. Each person cannot decide For most things, each person can decide and it works just fine. The more things we let individuals decide for themselves, the better off we are. If you mean each person can't decide what laws to follow, or if they pay taxes or not, well not it doesn't work well if we generally make all laws optional (in other words don't have any real legal limitations), or taxes optional (in other words no taxes, just requests for contributions), but no one here was calling for such a thing. If the hunter will not share the eldres will make him share. You can't make him share. You can steal from him, but that isn't sharing. To the extent you do so, you reduce the incentive to work hard, invest, and otherwise produce for both the wealthy (since your taking away much of the benefit they would otherwise get from hard work and risk taking), and the poor (since your removing the harsher consequences of not working, and creating dependency, in fact for any but a very low level of benefits you can create a situation where working hard to get a job, or a better job, or more hours, would cause them to be less well off as they lose benefits and start paying taxes). You try to support high taxes with the analogy to the hunter sharing the food with the tribe but they are very different things. The tribe members that don't hunt are mostly helping the tribe in other ways, they gather vegetable matter, make tools and weapons, trade with other tribes, etc. Few primitive tribes support many who won't work. In fact unlike modern societies, few or no people who can't work, at least for more than the short term, will or can be supported. When more primitive cultures do support the less fortunate, they often did it for people that they know, who they knew where trying to support themselves but faced some calamity which kept them from doing so. Bare minimum, temporary support and only at the sufferance of someone else, doesn't create the kind of disincentives and dependency that welfare and entitlements cause. Moving forward to your "we defeated Hitler", yes we had a strong "tribe", but not the extensive welfare and regulatory systems that we have today which make the "tribe" weaker not stronger.

To: koan who wrote (8758)	12/11/2010 10:16:49 AM
From: average joe	1 Recommendation Respond to of 10087

"Each person cannot decide because without the say of the collective group and the laws they decide on we end up with The Lord of the flies. If the hunter will not share the eldres will make him share." Tribal Premise (in Economics) The basic premise of crude, primitive tribal collectivism [is] the notion that wealth belongs to the tribe or to society as a whole, and that every individual has the “right” to “participate” in it. The tribal premise underlies today’s political economy. That premise is shared by the enemies and the champions of capitalism alike; it provides the former with a certain inner consistency, and disarms the latter by a subtle, yet devastating aura of moral hypocrisy—as witness, their attempts to justify capitalism on the ground of “the common good” or “service to the consumer” or “the best allocation of resources.” (Whose resources?) If capitalism is to be understood, it is this tribal premise that has to be checked—and challenged. Mankind is not an entity, an organism, or a coral bush. The entity involved in production and trade is man. It is with the study of man—not of the loose aggregate known as a “community”—that any science of the humanities has to begin. AYN RAND