On entertaining nuttiness, feminist utopias and vanity as virtue:
The narcissism of much of the middle class left is tautological, considering that they are people born into above average affluence who still feel they should get other people’s money because their art, or environmental campaigning, or political thought – rather than their need for subsistence – merits it.
Except the upper classes are just as likely to want to spend other people’s money, just in different ways (corporate welfare, tax loopholes, preferential wage and fiscal policies).
Ditto conservatives — they like other people’s money just fine too, as long as it’s going towards their pet causes (security, prisons, Wars on Drugs/Terror, etc.).
Ditto, say, the Catholic Church — they’re pretty affluent, but that doesn’t stop them eating to use other people’s money to pay for their Catholic school systems.
The whole argument you present is tautological and self-serving. The truth is, as long as you insist on defining taxes as “other people’s money” — as opposed to the cost of entry into an organized, synergistic civilized society — EVERYBODY is looking to spend other people’s money.
kt sez “…use other people’s money to pay for their Catholic school systems.” is symptomatic of your argument. The tax money is set aside for education. As a taxpayer, that’s what I want it spent on. If my kids (assuming the taxpayer in question has kids – but that’s a separate question) go to Catholic school then that’s where I want my tax dollars that are to be spent on education to go. I agree with taxation to pay for policing, public roads and infrastructure, our military. I don’t agree to pay for needle exchange programs, self-righteous anti-civilization “art”.
I can argue until I’m blue in the face that taxes should not be as high as they are. That doesn’t mean I should shut up about what the taxes I do pay is spent on. It’s not other people’s money I want to spend. It’s mine, dammit.
Nice mirror with “The whole argument you present is tautological and self-serving.”
You hit correctly the problem with kt’s post. Taxes are not “other people’s money”; it’s my money. And I want it spent on things useful to everyone paying taxes. What kt is trying to waffle around is appropriation of my money for their own personal benefit which provides no benefit to me.
“Other people’s money” is merely the phrase used by the author linked above. I repeated it only to make the points that (a) everyone, not just the middle class, or the Left, or the Right, has ideas about how “other people’s money” (i.e., the public purse) ought to be spent, and (b) thinking about taxes and other revenue as being “Person X’s money” (whether someone else’s or your own) is at best symbolic and at worst inaccurate and juvenile.
Of course, it’s useful insofar as stewards of the public purse — elected officials, bureaucrats, public servants, etc. — should be contantly mindful of and held to account for how public funds are spent. But to think that “my” tax dollars should only fund the stuff I want and “your” tax dollars should only fund the stuff you want is to miss entirely the point of paying taxes. It’s not transactional — one doesn’t pay up in order to receive specific, a la carte services. One pays taxes so that a society can exist at all, and so that one can participate in it.
Take your own spending priority of policing — I think we spend too much, relative to all the other things we could be spending the budget on. Ergo, to the extent that we end up spending what we spend, I’m subsidizing your priority — you’re spending my money, dammit. And on and on, for every single line item that any public dollars go towards — somebody will always disagree on whether X or Y is a worthwhile expenditure. The whole system works only we let go of the idea that there’s “your” public money vs. “my” public money. There’s only “our” public money.
And as for “useful for everyone” vs. “personal benefit”, that’s all subjective in the end, isn’t it? Who’s to say with any certainty, after all, that “self-righteous anti-civilization” public art is quantifiably less beneficial to society that having a publicly funded faith-based school system separate from the secular public school system?
You’re talking and that’s a problem. It has been made quite apparent that you speak before you think. You were corrected regarding taxes and Catholic schools (I suspect it was a jab at Catholics and, as it usually is, was a poor one) and now you’re bringing subjectivity into the public pot where taxpayers are forced to put their hard-earned money. Is it in the best interests of everyone to let roads go unmended while funding what washed-up fine arts degree students think is art?
The separate school system doesn’t use “other people’s money” to run its schools – its uses Catholic taxpayers’ money (or anyone who chooses to send their education tax dollars there). It’s a crude form of voucher system, but it should be expanded to cover all schools, until full privatization can be planned and implemented.
Kt: “The whole system works only we let go of the idea that there’s ‘your’ public money vs. ‘my’ public money. There’s only ‘our’ public money.”
This is usually the siren song of the person who wants the entirety of public money to be spent according to his own whims. It’s akin to, “Shut up, keep paying, and take what we give you”. This does not “work”, it’s divisive, setting everyone against everyone else.
Kt: “One pays taxes so that a society can exist at all, and so that one can participate in it.”
It’s nonsense to think that taxation is the price we pay for a civilized society. Taxation is coercive, and coercion is uncivilized. Period. The fundamental moral principle of civilization, as formulated by Ayn Rand, is, “No person has the right to initiate the use of force or fraud on any other person”. We should be planning to reduce the state to its proper functions of police, military and courts. Everything else individuals can produce for themselves, and trade with others.
Yes, yes, yes! Thank you nv 53!