charlie@cca.UUCP (Charlie Kaufman) (11/19/83)
I work for the war machine. Once, when I was feeling moral qualms about
it all, a friend (who is similarly employed) commented:
Well, I figure the Department of Defense has all this money, and
they are either going to use it to build things to kill people
or they are going to give it to me. Which is better?
There really is something to that. Unless you drop out of society
totally, you are going to something which results in your paying income
taxes. If you do, you are fueling the machine. There's no getting
around it. You can't avoid the issue so face it.
The issue for me is "Am I improving or hurting the prospects of mankind
by doing what I am doing"? For most activities, you have to think
fairly hard (counting direct and indirect effects and probable results)
to convince yourself one way or the other. And convincing yourself is
about the best you can hope for; the world is far too complicated to
make a really solid argument.
If you are truly interested in improving the prospects for mankind,
you'll have to do better than not working for a company involved with
"defense". You may avoid having to think about it, which is pleasant, but
your tax dollars will be hard at work. Actually having a positive
effect will take looking for positive actions. And those are more
likely to be found within the military industrial complex than outside
of it.
--Charlie Kaufman
charlie@cca
...decvax!cca!charlieleff@smu.UUCP (11/28/83)
#R:cca:-614600:smu:16200002:000:929 smu!leff Nov 27 09:55:00 1983 I guess one could either find a job that paid less than the minimum wage for paying taxes. . There was an article in the dallas paper about a minister who left his job because they refused to cut his salary. He found a job ministering to the poor in Louisiana. Or one could give one's money to charity. I don't know whether there is a limit on the percentage of your income you could give to charity but you could at least give up to that limit. Or you could defer your income. I worked for a small company for a while and had them defer large amounts of my income. I did it so they could pay it back later when I would be in graduate school and be in a less bracket. I guess you could simply permanently defer it (or at least until you became less concerned about the defense industry or they stopped doing whatever it is that you don't like.) I'll stop before I start bring too much net.tax stuff into net.philosphy.
leff@smu.UUCP (12/03/83)
#R:cca:-614600:smu:16200003:000:503 smu!leff Dec 1 07:50:00 1983 You also might look at the work done on the Zuse Z-1 in Germany during WW-II. He was building one of the first computers to help the Nazi War machine. He saw that they were going to lose anyway so he just continued anyway to help build a machine that would be useful after the war to help mankind. Yes the military wastes a lot of money. But they also support artificial intelligence, VLSI, walking machines and other things that may prove useful for non warlike environments. Just a thought here.