trc@houca.UUCP (10/25/83)
Responses to phs!jtb and Scott Preece on Govt vs Space I doubt that we share a common philosophical basis, so I will present an argument that should appeal to your common sense and/or sense of justice. Please bear with me, as I have to lay some ground work. First, understand what a government is: it is the social institution vested with a monopoly on the right to use of retaliatory force, within a geographical area. It may have taken other functions, but this is fundamental to the definition of government. (You may not like this fact, and wish it were otherwise, but it is certainly true that this is the present case with governments.) Accepting this, we have to consider what the nature of force is, and what the government can justly use that force for. Having gotten to that point, we can discuss whether funding space exploration is one of the things a government can justly do. The only fundamental way that force can be used is to attack human life. Some important derivative ways include: threat of use of force, causing pain (torture, beating), expulsion or exhile, imprisonment. It might seem that imprisonment is not an attack on human life but in fact imprisonment means that the prisoner is put under the total control of the jailer, and any attempt to escape is blocked by threat of death. Exhile requires that the exhiled be threatened (directly, or by putting him in a remote area from which he cannot return alive) with death if he should try to return. Torture uses pain, which is a direct death threat - this threat goes deeper than one's consciousness. Thus, when you consider whether something is just for a government to do, you must ask yourself whether it would be just for the government to back up that action with torture and death. To take a practical example, consider a man who does not agree that it is just that he should be forced to send his child to school. He refuses to do so. He refuses to surrender his child to authorities. The authorities threaten physical force. He replies with equal threats, and cannot be convinced by reason. The authorities now have a choice - agree that the man is right about their law, or use direct force to fulfill their ends, backed by torture or death. They can imprison him in order to achieve their ends, but they have to use direct force to do this. In most cases, there is one simple question that you can ask yourself to get a common sense answer to whether something is proper for a government to do. "Is this thing important enough that the government should be allowed, if necessary, to beat a person in order to get it, or even kill him?". (Applied to the case of preventing a man from murdering another, the answer is yes, for example.) Now apply this to the $10 that you would take from everyone to pay for space exploration. "Is getting $10 from someone for the space effort important enough that the government should be allowed, if necessary, to beat a person in order to get it, or even kill him?" I say NO, it is not, and that this makes any arguments about what is practical irrelevant. (In fact, I still reject the argument of practicality - my small amount of observation of history and politics inclines me to believe that backing any effort with the government's *force* allows the effort to become corrupt and lazy. And then there are considerations of the effects of the regulation intended to prevent corruption that almost inevitably goes with with a government backed monopoly. The Anti-trust laws fall into this category, and yes, I would abolish them. See "The Myth of Antitrust" [author forgotten]. In most cases the "serious abuses" amounted to either government backed real abuses, or companies complaining that a competitor was being too efficient. Hardly an abuse from the consumer's point of view!) Tom Craver houca!trc
shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs) (10/26/83)
Ye gods, I really hate to get into this in net.sf-lovers too, but Tom started it, so - One of the problems with depending on a laissez-faire system is that anything which has only long-range benefits doesn't get done. How many companies would have done any space work 25 years ago? If the govt hadn't funded something back then, we might still be experimenting with suborbital rockets. I'd say the govt has done a very good job, and I'm willing to let it continue... I notice that despite Tom's use of the emotionally-loaded words "beating" and "killing", that such punishment for breaking the law is rare - even for major crimes. I also notice that no one seems to be resisting taxes because a small portion is spent on the space program - so either everybody has decided, through a rational process, that the expense is justified, or else everybody is irrational, therefore has no rights, therefore it's ok to take their money. In fact, most of the tax resistance seems to be against the expenditures for "defense". Oh well, I guess we're all just irrational, and doomed to be enslaved by the first decent AI project (I predict within my lifetime, and that's a conservative estimate - the optimistic ones say 25 years). Irrationally yours, stan the l.h. utah-cs!shebs
laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Laura Creighton) (10/31/83)
The argument "people wouldn't fund things where there are no immediate gains" may be specious. If I didn't have to pay any taxes, I could spend a *lot* more money on the space program. So could a lot of people I know. There might be *MORE* money for NASA under this scheme. The other thing to consider is that *one* of the reasons that companies go for short term gains rather than long term, is that if you give the government enough lead-in time there are numerous cases where a poor company has sat down to reap the benefits of their long term gains and found the tax-man has got there ahead of them and is proceeding to tax the hell out of the enterprise. it kind of takes the edge off the victory, now, doesn't it? But what you are actually saying is that people ought to have foresight, don't, and so we need a government to be the foresight of the people. I think that we need to teach people to have more foresight. And you can't do that while also treating them as morons who are incapable of foresight. I'm not all that convinced that governments have any more foresight than the next election anyway. Laura Creighton utcsstat!laura
jj@rabbit.UUCP (11/02/83)
I AM convinced that governments have MUCH less foresight (at least democratic ones) than anything else. I don't think you put it strongly enough, Laura. Shouldn't this argument be in net.politics (where there is a discussion of earmarking tax money going on right now)?
CSvax:Pucc-H:Physics:els@pur-ee.UUCP (11/03/83)
That was a joke, right??? That has to be the strangest definition of
government I've ever heard! Besides, shouldn't this stuff be on net.politics/
space/jokes/anything but here?
els[Eric Strobel]
pur-ee!Physics:els