"Freedom" thread or something

So am I.  I have given a real, live situation where not only is tax required but many libertarian values would not be workable.   We have enough anarchy in India without being an anarcho capitalist society, thank you.   I would appreciate if there was at least an attempt to understand this instead of arguing over hypothetical scenarios.  Because my only point in bringing up the need for tax in India is your theory is not absolute.  It is not universally applicable.  Like a lot of economics, it is applicable in specific situations under a given set of assumptions.   So keep an open mind instead of blatantly rejecting the wisdom of systems that are not libertarian.  Whether or not it fits your value set should have no bearing on your ability to respect a different position.  

And I dislike that.   I built up a case also hinging on moral values as to why a tax was necessary and you are only interested in the part that you cannot agree with.   Sorry but that indeed doesn't contribute to productive discussion.   The only reason I had to go into detail on the caste system was to present the existence of a dilemma of which kind of values to uphold - liberty and choice or social responsibility.  To completely sidestep that aspect and focus on a solitary sentence just misses the point.  

If you do not read and comprehend the full post (and it wasn't THAT long compared to some of the stuff posted here), you are going to understand what all I wanted to convey and only provoke a meaningless discussion, which is exactly what you did.  What I wrote was a whole, not a sum of parts that you could just cherry pick at according to your wishes.

tl;dr

Do government surpluses harm private wealth? As it spends less and less by default we must spend more. Some periods of government reduction were the 1830s, huge recession, the 1920s, huge recession, and the 1990s, small recession but fueled the bubble that led to our current one.

thellama73 wrote: JJLehto wrote: As it spends less and less by default we must spend more. Why? The common misconception is that the economy runs on consumption, but Austrians (including me!) believe that saving and investment is more important, and that rampant consumption without a high level of savings is not a good thing.

And I do agree with that, I think we have a pretty weak economy if its built solely on our orgy of spending...and it sure seems that way now that we havn't been spending.

Edited by JJLehto - August 05 2013 at 12:39

rogerthat wrote: If you do not read and comprehend the full post (and it wasn't THAT long compared to some of the stuff posted here), you are going to understand what all I wanted to convey and only provoke a meaningless discussion, which is exactly what you did.  What I wrote was a whole, not a sum of parts that you could just cherry pick at according to your wishes.

I brought up an entirely separate issue which had nothing to do with your post. I don't see the problem with that.

^heh which is not really much of a surprise.

The Hole in our Collective Memory: How Copyright made Mid-Century Books Vanish

Equality 7-2521 wrote: The Hole in our Collective Memory: How Copyright made Mid-Century Books Vanish

Intriguing as always Pat

When FDR took office there was something like a 3 billion dollar deficit due to the Hoover administration.