Not every small business idea can find private venture capital. I would think the govt is able to dispense more funding than any private business, and therefore can offer more than what a private business could do. Whats the point of a government if it doesn't support and take care of its citizens??
Not every small business idea can find private venture capital. I would think the govt is able to dispense more funding than any private business, and therefore can offer more than what a private business could do. Whats the point of a government if it doesn't support and take care of its citizens??
Amused
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I know exactly what you meant, and I stand by my opinion. I stated that I know abolishing public education will not happen as the people can't fathom life without it. So as a stop gap, I think refunding tax dollars to those who don't want to participate is a good thing.
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wow... you must have a lot more faith in people than i if its all going to operate on donations... treat it like a loan and get a portion of a person's income for the rest of their life... well you can't sign contracts with 6 year olds... hit the business that would employ trained people... well now you're just starting to sound like the gov't except you could opt-out of the plan... i'm more of the opinion that access to education is a right than a privilege, i guess thats the fundamental difference.
Amused
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A right? Tell me, how is it a right, and entitlement, to benefit from the labor of others?
Ayn Rand says it better than I: If some men are entitled by right to the products of the work of others, it means that those others are deprived of rights and condemned to slave labor. Any alleged "right" of one man, which necessitates the violation of the rights of another, is not and cannot be a right. No man can have a right to impose an unchosen obligation, an unrewarded duty or an involuntary servitude on another man. There can be no such thing as "the right to enslave."
There is no "right" to medical care because it requires the labor of another. Therefore there should be no "right" to education either.
Amused
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When "the common good" of a society is regarded as something apart from and superior to the individual good of its members, it means that the good of some men takes precedence over the good of others, with those others consigned to the status of sacrificial animals.
The end does not justify the means. No one's rights can be secured by the violation of the rights of others.
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general welfare is merely the aggregate of the total benefit of all members of society. pareto efficient outcome no one could possibly be better off without making someone else worse off. its not something seperate and superior, its merely the whole. and i believe we come closest to that through educating all. the rights of the others aren't violated, they're willfully given up to get a greater set of rights through the social contract.
Amused
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Again, this right is gained at the violation of the rights of others. Your idea of the "greater good" is merely YOUR interpretation of your moral code. What would you say if someone else's idea of the "greater good" violated your moral code?
Our government was chartered to "PROMOTE" the general welfare, not provide. You, and everyone else, are not entitled to the labor of others, Fenix, no matter how you try and justify it morally.
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the general welfare is an accepted term in economics. and that equals the total benefit of all members of a society. theres no morals involved.
as for promote v provide, who said provide? the second definition (the first deals with promotion at work/school) is "To contribute to the progress or growth of; further. " which i believe public education does.
by entering into society you willfully give up some rights in order to protect and enchance others. in this society i don't have the right to go around killing people. i have that without a society. but i gave it up. i have the right to run around uneducated and with a meager existence, but by joining society i allow a claim on my labor so that society can educate me and give me roads to drive on and other public services that i, for the most part, enjoy. those that i don't i, as a responsible citizen, work within the framework of society to make better to my liking. others, by joining this society, have the same that i do. for all of us we give up rights that we deem unnecessary or less worthwhile in order to be able to enjoy the remainder to a far greater degree than we would ever enjoy all our rights outside of society. this is all willfull. its not slavery, its my choice.
if nothing entitles me to the work of others than why isn't a royalty paid to the inventor of the table? or the chair? or ball bearings? or internal combustion engines? or physics? every time i use F=MA to solve an equation should i be paying sir isaac (or was that da vinci)? i'm pretty sure the publishing house doesn't pay the estate of samuel clements. again, they chose the society to operate in, and so 100, 1000, 10,000 years later i don't owe them anything but i'm benefiting from their work.
say i join the military. its a society unto itself. i know full well i could, at some time, be called upon by my captains to fight a rear-guard delaying action that will most likely get me killed but will save the rest of my comrades. i joined the military, i will accept that its my fate, and i will try to save my comrades through my actions. what gives them the right to benefit from that labor? its because they joined the military too.
Amused
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Stop right there. It's painfully obvious you are STILL not grasping what I am saying here. There can be no right to infringe on the rights of others. You never had the RIGHT to kill others. You may have had the power. You may have had the freedom, but you never had the "right."
This is the meat of my whole position. You cannot have a right that infringes upon the right of another, no matter how much you think this may benefit society.
Any education, paid for unwillingly by threat of imprisonment condemns others to slavery for your "common good." It violates the rights of those who do not wish to pay, or participate. Just as you killing another person violates their rights.
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oh yes, its the right to kill to protect my own rights. you give that up to society so that society can enforce its rules. kill is the extreme, of course. say theres a guy taking my crops that i've worked my arse off harvesting from plants i worked my arse off plowing. hes benefiting from my labor without my permission. i ask this brute to leave, he doesn't. what my recourse? well, i have the right to my labor, so i hit him, knocking him unconscious or whatever. well, what about his right to a secure person? or perhaps life? oops, i just violated that with my right to my labor. maybe i don't have the right to defend my crops? well thats a conundrum.
rights are a social construct. there are no inherent, unalienable rights. john locke and thomas jefferson lied to you. rights are defined by the society that sets them (most times just an intellectual subset of that society), and nothing more. some people might not like every single one, might like some more than others, but in general they feel better served by society than by leaving it or they would. the constitution is merely a set of laws agreed upon by society that is harder to change than your average law. its been changed 27 times. the "bill of rights" was originally 12 amendments. 11 were passed.
Amused
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No conundrum here, Fenix. That's why the right to use lethal force to protect your person and property is a right. You have not violated his rights, he has violated your right to person and property and gave up his own when doing so. His rights end where yours begin. When he violates your rights, he forfeits his own.
I can see you really haven't thought this through very much...
Really? What's the 11th?
Fenix, if you do not believe human rights are inherent, you obviously have no problem supplanting them to meet your own ends. For you, the ends justify the means and society is more important than the individual. This is anathema to the basis of our country's entire founding and purpose for being created. Why would you want to live in a country who's entire foundation is anathema to your collectivist ideology where man has no rights, other than those "granted" by the elite, royalty, or popular opinion?
ThePresence
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What happened to my thread? There is a lunatic in here raving about how public education enslaves taxpayers. Only at anandtech!
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Originally posted by: Amused
Really? What's the 11th?
Fenix, if you do not believe human rights are inherent, you obviously have no problem supplanting them to meet your own ends. For you, the ends justify the means and society is more important than the individual. This is anathema to the basis of our country's entire founding and purpose for being created. Why would you want to live in a country who's entire foundation is anathema to your collectivist ideology where man has no rights, other than those "granted" by the elite, royalty, or popular opinion?
some of the grants are for education, so its still almost on topic.
the 11th is amendment 27. look at the introduction date. it was actually found by a student at UCLA a decade back and he pushed it through. really interesting.
as for rights, it doesn't really matter if they're inherent or not, when you enter society you give up a portion of your rights, a claim on some of them, so that society can help you protect and expand your other rights. you obviously can forfeit your rights, as you just pointed out. no, the ends don't justify the means, and no, i'm not a collectivist. well, maybe i am from your anarchist perspective. its just that the social contract, which you entered into or else you can go sit in the woods and be alone with your thoughts (because thats all you'd do without a social contract), allows the gov't, who i willingly grant this power, to have some of my income in order to protect me, and to help me achieve some of my goals. in the society i entered i can't go around righting wrongs that others have done me, thats vigilantism. and to read your posts you think that entering into society is a zero-sum game. or worse. its not. like i said, without society you'd be alone to your thoughts and your activities, but your activities would consist of little more than subsistence farming at best. the only way to achieve more, to get a greater reward for your life's labors, is to join a society. once you join a society you're subject to its rules. in what we would call a just society everyone has input as to what these rules should be. we have something close to it in the US. i agree with most of the rules, otherwise i'd go out and be a subsistence farmer somewhere. one of those rules is that i give up a portion of my income to the gov't to do things that i mostly agree with. and its not a loss becuase it allows society to provide me with enchanced security than i could myself, a greater range of goods than i could myself, and a greater opportunity of careers than i could myself. joining a society has allowed me to become far more educated that i ever would on my own.
you don't get it. i choose to join this society. i choose to abide by its laws. if i don't like it, i can choose to try to change the, either through activism, my vote, or by running for office myself. if i really don't like it, i can choose to live out in the wilderness as a subsistence hunter/gatherer/farmer. by myself. alone. compared to that austere life, i gladly allow society to have some of my income to do what it sees fit. its my choice.
Amused
Elite Member
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My position is far from anarchy. It is libertarian. My position HAS a government that exists to protect individual rights. The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man's rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man's self-defense, and, as such, may only resort to force only against those who start the use of force.
Please, get it right.
And the sad thing is you feel you have to give up individual rights to be part of a society. You do not. What is worse, is that you have no compunction about taking these rights away from others.
Please, get it right.
And the sad thing is you feel you have to give up individual rights to be part of a society. You do not. What is worse, is that you have no compunction about taking these rights away from others.
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