🚀 go-pugleaf

"Keith F. Lynch" <KFL%MX.LCS.MIT.EDU@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU> writes:

>[The government] should serve everyone, but only to the extent of
>preventing individual rights from being violated.  It should not and
>cannot be involved with protecting people from their own economic
>misjudgements, or with redistributing wealth, or trying to compensate
>for the inequalities of past generations.
>...
>It should
>be evident even to socialists and the feeble-minded that if people 
>who

Then you admit that not all socialists are feeble-minded? :-)

>worked are taxed to pay people who don't work, that the net amount of
>wealth has not increased.  Poverty is conserved.


I agree that simply taking from the rich and giving to the poor does
not increase wealth; however it does change the amount of poverty
(please note that i am not advocating such a simple approach).  If
wealth were completely redistributed equally, then either everyone or
noone would be in poverty, by definition!  Thus it cannot be a
conserved quantity!  (Keith, you should have applied a little of your
basic physics reasoning here :-) .)  That is, unless you consider a
rich person to be in a state of "negative poverty", but i have never
heard of this usage before.

It has also been argued by you and/or other libertarians that
government should not be involved in public education.  But does not
using tax money to educate those who could not otherwise afford an
education *increase* wealth by making more people capable of producing
useful things/services/etc?

                                        ~joe testa~
-------
-------