Nope, sorry, but I was "endowed by (my) Creator with certain unalienable Rights, (and) that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.". Presumably so were you.

That's great on paper, but an effective government is necessary for you to actually enjoy those rights. Otherwise, your actual rights are limited to what you can personally assert by force.

And finally, the amounts of my taxes that goes to those things I actually use is dwarfed by that which I will either never see benefit from (social security/medicare/medicaid/etc.) or which I don't support (foreign aid/wars on foreign soil/etc.... How about I pay for the services I use. That seems fair. That seems to be how businesses get by.

So, let's say we're discussing aid for injured veterans. If everyone only pays for the services they use, injured veterans are the only people who should pay for these services. That's the capitalism end of the spectrum.

The socialism end of the spectrum is everyone pays for everything equally. We're not there either-- transportation projects tend to be funded by taxes on gasoline, tolls on public roadways, and the like. Some government agencies fund themselves (some sectors of R&D, the Post Office, etc.) through capitalist methods.

We lean capitalist in most sectors, with the major exception being those government programs which provide aid for poverty. The problem is, of course, that the poor simply can't pay for these programs. Now, some people are poor because they make horrible decisions. Many people are poor because they were born poor, and thus got a sub-par education, and later had to make career decisions based only of short-term goals (I need food this week) instead of long-term goals (I can take this crappy internship because a few years down the line it will mean a better job). Poverty is terribly, terribly cumulative.

So, either:
1) The non-poor provide a net flow of money toward poverty relief, or
2) We find out what happens if you have a large group of people without enough money for true necessities. Specifically, a lot of people die, others riot, and you see either Depression-era collapse of economies or a reversion to de facto slavery/serfdom.

Police protection is a farce. I can protect myself much better than the police can or would. It seems to me that the very wealthy already hire private protection (Hi Vlad!) and that the poor wouldn't exactly consider the police their best friends.

This is completely ridiculous macho posturing. Read up on what happens to areas (say, Watts) when police protection systemically breaks down due to underfunding, corruption, and other factors. The result is not that everyone ends up better-protected. Rather, it reverts to anarchy, where rights are only asserted by force.

Heck, take a simpler case. How could you drive with no authority in charge of traffic enforcement?

That sounds like a good idea... when was the last time we did that? (Cut services)

You have to go all the way back to... the Clinton Administration. (Carter held it constant, Reagan and Bush 41 both increased the size of government steadily.)

Edit: Link is busted. Wanted to link to here for a graphical summary:

Clinton inherited a government with outlays equal to 22.1% of GDP and shrunk it to 18.4% of GDP in his eight years. Bush expanded it back to 20.2% in his first three years despite falling government revenues, and I can't find more recent data on how it's gone since, but going by the annual deficit's rapid growth I'm thinking the news isn't good.

The current administration has sharply expanded spending (primarily on defense) on things the majority of Americans don't support. (They've also brutalized scientific spending, with money bled out of effective programs to fund things like "faith-based works", abstinence education, etc... so the 'real' spending on things most people do support like R&D drops even as the budget numbers rise.) That's irresponsible government, not what the system was designed to do, and unfortunately I think we're going to wait for another round of elections to sort that out. Sadly, laws don't do much if the people in charge don't follow them, or don't follow them wisely.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com