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Originally posted by Joel
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It's exactly what it is.
Who is doing the moral good? The person being forced? The agent doing the forcing (via the threat of physical force)? The person who voted in favor of the second person forcing the first? None of them.
This isn't justice (it's the opposite of justice), and it's isn't charity (which is giving what is yours).
A person could be helped by mere natural forces, but that wouldn't be a moral good.
Thus morally speaking, it is only wrongdoing.
Because it's not a moral good, you are only making a utilitarian comparison here, not a moral comparison. Such utilitarianism runs into lots of problems. For example, suppose Alice steals one of Bob's kidneys and gives it to Charlie (while perhaps Alice keeps her own two kidneys). By your utilitarian comparison you could say that the good far outweighs the bad because it saves Charlie's life while only taking an excess kidney from Bob. Yet Alice committed an injustice.
(Also your "taking away a tiny bit of some rich person's excessive wealth that they weren't using" contains several untrue assumptions.)
You don't need taxes for any of that. You can freely donate as much as you want to the government. But it would be even better to cut out the overhead of the government and give more directly.
I propose that your economic ideas do not match reality.
(Was it you that had those wonky ideas about how marginal cost and marginal revenue work in another thread?)
In what ways? Regardless which party is in the majority, they both expand the welfare state, they both expand the regulatory state, they both vote for war. Just in slightly different ways and different rates.
I agree that a different voting system would probably improve that.
Who is doing the moral good? The person being forced? The agent doing the forcing (via the threat of physical force)? The person who voted in favor of the second person forcing the first? None of them.
This isn't justice (it's the opposite of justice), and it's isn't charity (which is giving what is yours).
A person could be helped by mere natural forces, but that wouldn't be a moral good.
Thus morally speaking, it is only wrongdoing.
Because it's not a moral good, you are only making a utilitarian comparison here, not a moral comparison. Such utilitarianism runs into lots of problems. For example, suppose Alice steals one of Bob's kidneys and gives it to Charlie (while perhaps Alice keeps her own two kidneys). By your utilitarian comparison you could say that the good far outweighs the bad because it saves Charlie's life while only taking an excess kidney from Bob. Yet Alice committed an injustice.
(Also your "taking away a tiny bit of some rich person's excessive wealth that they weren't using" contains several untrue assumptions.)
You don't need taxes for any of that. You can freely donate as much as you want to the government. But it would be even better to cut out the overhead of the government and give more directly.
I propose that your economic ideas do not match reality.
(Was it you that had those wonky ideas about how marginal cost and marginal revenue work in another thread?)
In what ways? Regardless which party is in the majority, they both expand the welfare state, they both expand the regulatory state, they both vote for war. Just in slightly different ways and different rates.
I agree that a different voting system would probably improve that.
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