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Politics : The Trump Presidency -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (92490)	9/3/2018 4:26:04 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362598

Oh yeah, I'm sure there is a "category error" there somewhere in musing about why the payment mechanism for two such things MUST be radically different. It's not so much that the payment mechanism is different but rather a conceptual difference in kind. That's what category error means--mixing up two different kinds. I wrote: I don't know what the military has to do with welfare programs at all, you know, the federal government giving people lunch and other stuff out of taxpayer money rather than them buying it for themselves. So, one kind is welfare programs, which are categorized, as I described, as the feds paying for consumer goods--stuff that individuals normally pay for themselves. The other kind is the military. The basic functions of the United States government are listed in the Constitution. They are: 'To form a more perfect Union'; 'To establish Justice'; 'To insure domestic Tranquility'; 'To provide for the common defense';... Surely you can see that providing for "the common defense," aka military, is different from giving individuals consumer stuff. One difference is "common," meaning the country at large, vs individual benefit. Another is that the Constitution says that it's a basic function of the government to defend the country. It doesn't say anything about giving individual people consumer stuff. As for the payment mechanism, the government produces and pays for the military centrally out of taxpayer money. With welfare programs, the government distributes taxpayer money for individual products and services. The payment mechanisms are different but that's not the crux of the difference. It's a difference in kind or category. Lets see, why is this so difficult: 1) Healthcare helps people defend against the ravages of sickness and disease. 2) The military helps people defend against aggression from other people. The military is not helping people to defend anything. It's defending the country against outsiders. If it were helping people "defend against aggression from other people," it would distribute weapons or the money to buy them to people, not mobilize and pay for an army. That's not to say that we should or shouldn't give people a free lunch, only that the provision of it is a kind/ category of government activity that is not traditional and not carved in stone. Unlike the military, which is both. The government dipped its toe in the water in the previous century wrt giving people consumer stuff. That is an in-process paradigm shift, not a settled change of direction.