roadrunnertwice

From:

It's all good; the best way to not get argued with is to not post huge screeds on one's LJ. (Please pardon my lag, though; I always have to get away from the keys for a while after writing something like that. What I said about political writing being hard.)

3. We also take your property by force and use it to fight fires that aren't your fault, investigate and redress crimes that aren't your fault, repair roads you didn't damage, and educate kids you didn't spawn. But despite their violent and coercive origins, I'm going to guess that you're in favor of socialized firefighting and socialized road repair. I am, too (and several socialized other things, besides), because a free and just society isn't possible without ensuring that certain vital services are available even to people who can't afford them. The money you lose to taxation doesn't buy some specific service for some random person somewhere; it buys the existence of the type of civil society in which, should the worst happen to you, you're ensured some minimum amount of protection against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

You know, as a sidenote, the "Taking property by force" framing for taxation really is a brilliant bit of rhetorical flourish, and I tip my hat to whoever first got that ball rolling. It's got everything a good frame ought to have: Factual correctness, shameless emotional manipulation (plus some good strong visual imagery), and enough cognitive force to gloss over and push aside a really impressive amount of common wisdom about the social contract.

Technical brilliance aside, I really hate that frame, because there's no room in it for the fact that we can't do everything by ourselves. There's no recognition that there but for the grace of God go I. It replaces all that with a sort of grand, mythic, monumental fantasy of rugged individualism. Which... seems to have brought me full circle to my general beef with Libertarianism. --It's like, I recognize that libertarianism, as a tendency, serves as a necessary e-brake on the train of state, but I really really don't like the places that Libertarianism, as a philosophy, thinks we ought to be laying tracks to. They're cold, lonely places.

1 and 2, I think Froborr pretty much covered me. 4... well, that one's mine to own, I guess. I still think that the philosophy of Libertarianism and the attacks we saw on that kid's family are born from the same fundamental blind spot. And at the end of the day, the harm done to them by this little brouhaha pales compared to the harm they'd have suffered by the sober and principled destruction of the program that kept them from going under.

I'm sorry, I realize that I sometimes get in your face about this sort of thing. You're a damn good friend to put up with my intemperate venting. =/