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From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.space
Subject: Space Fund
Message-ID: <207@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 23-Feb-86 20:13:32 EST
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.207
Posted: Sun Feb 23 20:13:32 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 28-Feb-86 07:38:56 EST
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
Lines: 32


>From: J.JPM@EPIC (Jim McGrath)
>As has been pointed out, in America the culture encourages individuals
>helping other individuals in as direct a manner as possible.  I fail
>utterly to see how anyone could possibly consider "help" from an
>unfeeling government, which gets its "public" funds via coercive
>taxation (re: robbery) to somehow be "better" (I assume morally) that
>individuals freely giving of their own wealth in as direct a manner as
>they can.

I fail utterly to see how this is true. Our current welfare system etc
was prompted by the total failure of individuals to help other individuals
in a direct manner, the facts speak for themselves. Through history large
civilizations have had to organize enforced charities through taxes and
tithes (or enslave their poor) as a means to subdue popular revolution.
Unfortunately the wealthy are largely selfish almost by their very
nature give or take a few exceptions (known as philanthropists, mostly
robber-barons who developed a guilty conscience or hatred of their
potential inheritors or a love of the tax loopholes or all of the above
and whose wealth can generally be tracked to far more misery than charity.)

As far as taxation == robbery, this statement is somewhere on the
lunatic fringe of civil libertarianism, do you seriously expect the
members of this group, for example, to pass the hat and replace NASA?
(that was a bold attempt to draw this conversation back to the subject
at hand.) It is quite reasonable to argue about where the pot gets spent,
but this sort of argument is ridiculous and unproductive. Better an
unfeeling government than nothing at all, remember, the body gets hungry
quite quickly, more quickly than it takes to process a job application
even among the best of intentioned down on their luck.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University