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From: kfl%mx.lcs.mit.edu@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU
Newsgroups: mod.politics
Subject: Re: Who pays?
Message-ID: <12233149094.32.MCGREW@RED.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Sat, 23-Aug-86 14:14:58 EDT
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Posted: Sat Aug 23 14:14:58 1986
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    From: campbell%maynard.UUCP@harvisr.HARVARD.EDU

    It is often the case that everyone, or nearly everyone, benefits,
    and that it is impossible to quantify the individual benefit
    received by any one person.  The communications (telephone,
    telegraph, post) and transportation (roads, trains, airline
    industry) infrastructure are the best-known and most illustrative
    examples of this.

  I think it is quite possible to quantify the costs and benefits, in
these and all other cases.

    >    Tell that to Mexico.  Or does the agricultural and mineral
    >wealth of the continent stop abruptly at the Mexican border?

    I failed to place enough emphasis on the agricultural part of our
    wealth, which is NOT shared by Mexico (they have nothing like the
    corn belt), and which is probably more important to us than our
    mineral wealth.

  Have you ever seen the Mexican border?  It is quite abrupt.  On one
side are skyskrapers and a few blocks to the south are hovels.  Does
our corn belt extend right to the border?  What percent of our GNP is
corn, anyway?  And how does wealth from the corn belt get to the US
southwest?  And why doesn't it go a few yard further, into Mexico?
  The border between the US and Mexico is a political boundary.
Nothing mineral or vegetable suddenly changes at the border.  Neither
does the intelligence of the people.  Only the political system
changes.  So what differences we do see on opposite sides of the
border are clearly due to differences in the political system.  In
fact, since much of Mexico's wealth is due to trade with the US and
Japan, the difference is actually much greater than it appears from
looking at the border.  Especially since residents of the border
cities in Mexico get much of their income from US tourism.

    >   Is Japan's recent success due to its adoption of free
    >enterprise?  Or is agricultural and mineral wealth responsible
    >there too?  Strange how no communist countries seem to have any.

    Japan's economy is at least as regulated as ours.

  Which is probably the explanation for why they are only the SECOND
most productive nation.  The US is still in first place.
  More heavily regulated economies do worse.  Totally regulated
economies are total disasters.

    They also have the substantial and peculiar advantage of having
    been forced by a conqueror to have only a token military
    establishment,

  True.  I am not sure what to do about this.  I'm certainly not
comfortable with the idea of a rearmed Japan.  Neither are most
Japanese these days.  If the US did ask for tribute from Japan to pay
for the US defense umbrella, or if the US said it planned to phase out
its defense of Japan and was asking Japan to rearm, I think Japan
would call our bluff.  They know as well as we do that our defense of
Japan is for OUR benefit, not theirs.
  Any other country would have simply taken over much or all of Japan
after conquering it.  For instance the Soviet Union took over
thousands of square miles of northern Japan despite the fact that they
were only at war with Japan for the final week of World War II, well
after Roosevelt (and spies) told Stalin we had developed the atomic
bomb.

    while ours threatens to devour our entire GNP.

  It is way too large, but that is an exaggeration.  Less than 20
percent of tax money goes for defense.  The vast majority of it goes
to various social programs.

    >    ... when telephones first started, there WAS competition, 
    >    and it DID NOT WORK. ...
    >
    >  You think this might have a little bit to do with the low level
    >of 19th century electronic technology?

    So what?  Does that make my political argument invalid?

  When you say something didn't work 100 years ago, and blame it on
capitalism, that is a little strange.
  Well, I used a 30 year old computer once and it didn't work very
well.  Does this mean that we should adopt socialism?  I fail to
follow your logic.

    Gotcha!  I was NOT trying to argue that a particular industry
    (telephone) should necessarily continue to be a regulated
    monopoly.  I was arguing, and I think you've conceded my point,
    that there can be perfectly sound reasons for certain industries
    to be composed of regulated monopolies.  Electric power utilities
    are an example that is still valid today.

  I have conceded nothing.  You have failed to present any evidence
that there is such a thing as a natural monopoly.  In fact there are
several areas where rival electric companies compete, and the rates
there are LOWER than in the rest of the country.

    >    Now, many objectivists and libertarians like to moan and 
    >    groan about how society has no right to "pick my pocket", or
    >    "force me to do something".
    >
    >  See, here you are doing it.  What you are talking about is 
    >called 'government'.  Why not use the word?  It isn't all THAT
    >loathsome.

    Government is an integral part of society.  Either word would have
    been valid in my sentence.

  The part of society that robs people, excluding street thugs which
are clearly not who you are referring to, is called government.
  Simply stating that government, meaning a government with authority
to tax people, is an integral part of society begs the very question
we are debating.

    Baloney.  Government provides or insures most of your physical
    safety (police and defense).

  I thought my safety had more to do with most people being honest,
the locks on my doors, most individual's strong disapproval of
burglary (equally harsh laws against drug use have had little effect
precisely because so many individuals do NOT strongly disapprove of
drug use), and the local voluntary neighborhood watch group.  The
police are needed very rarely.  I have never needed to call them.
  National defense is needed only because of the many governments in
the world organized on the principles you advocate.

    Government provides economic activity, or at least the tools and
    framework within which economic activity occur.

  Wrong.

    Government creates money ...

  Wrong again.  They do print certificates and mint coins which
REPRESENT money.  But most money these days is not in that form.  They
cannot and do not CREATE even one cent.
  If they COULD create money, why couldn't they do away with taxes and
with the deficit, by creating enough money to finance all their
programs?

    Government funds an enormous amount of medical and scientific
    research.

  Which should be privately financed.

    ... Most importantly, government provides most of the rules of
    the game.

  The rule of the game is simply to never initiate the use of force
against anyone.  Government's one true function is to be the referee.
Not to make new inconsistent rules.

    How do you voluntarily trade what you can produce for police
    protection?

  There can be (and are) private police departments.

    Or defense?

  Defense should be supported by voluntary contributions.  Remember
that even the bloated and wasteful defense system we have now takes
less than 20 percent of tax revenues.

    Or environmental protection?

  Costs of pollution control can be passed on to the consumers of the
products that require it for manufacture.
                                                              ...Keith

[ Here we go again.  All we have to do is get everyone to think like
we do and everything will be fine, eh?  Some governments use their
armies for conquest.  Saying that they shouldn't do that is a pleasant
but unworkable answer.  Libertarian societies will not break out
simultaneously all over the world.  What do libertarians do in the
face of naked aggression on a national scale?

  How would an army-less libertarian France, lets say, defend itself
from Nazi Germany in 1940?  Consider that voluntary contributions are
tied to perceived danger, so that in 1936 (or so) the contributions
would have had to have been very high indeed (when danger was
perceived to be low) to be able to build the factories to build the
tanks, artillery, ships, and so on and hire the men to be trained in
them.  Remember, we cannot use hindsight and say "they could have seen
it coming".  What everyone saw up until late 1939 was a war all right-
between Germany and Russia.

  In answering this please don't trot out the old 'militia' or 'group
of small private armies' stuff - we both know that wouldn't work.  And
don't say 'that was then this is now', because if anything, things
have changed for the worse war-wise.  So what happens to libertarian
France?  Down to defeat?  (Don't say "we'll wait for the Amis" - in
this alternate history, the Americans turned isolationist and didn't
enter the European war at all).  As usual, I don't have clever
answers, just long questions... - CWM]
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