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Quote by: Winter wind  Well according to you the government doesn't have the right to take much money, really, at all. But like I said. This is a practical threat. It is in the interest of national security which is one of the ways the Constitution allows government to tax.
Well, by that argument, all charity is ineffective.
A flat out argument against that is John D. Rockefeller provided major funding for Spelman College. Gave 80 million (in 1900s) to the University of Chicago when it was just a small Baptist College. Both are huge Colleges. You can read the rest here. John D. Rockefeller - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"To help an inefficient, ill-located, unnecessary school is a waste...it is highly probable that enough money has been squandered on unwise educational projects to have built up a national system of higher education adequate to our needs, if the money had been properly directed to that end."
--John D. Rockefeller.
Charity needs to be wisely spent, not thrown around. Yet when it is, it doesn't create dependence, it actually helps.
So none of that dependence garbage. It makes for a poor argument (and is generally lacking in evidence.) |
The government can raise sufficient wealth for the national defence by way of duties. It needn't levy a tax upon income.
No, not all charity is inneffective. If the goal of charity is to feed a person for another day, it is quite easily effective, If it is to allow a person to achieve self-sufficiency (not autarky, of course), it is much more difficult. And the people who have failed to improve thrid world states for 50 years, Western governments, are the ones who want more money to squander.
Okay, if you want to deal with facts in particular, look at India. A very large 3rd world state that has been in a hot and cold war with Pakistan since the seperation. It remained neutral throughout the Cold War,so it never recieved anything like the aid it could have. The aim of Nehru's India was to achieve actual independance and self-sufficiency. So yes, they may well have suffered in the short term, but look at it now. It is booming. Yes, it has great poverty as well as great wealth, but at the turn of the 20th century, so did the US.
I can also point to the other East Asian tigers who embraced capitalism instead of socialism and have achieved great things.
Now let's compare it to a state that recieved aid for almost it's entire life, Cuba. Untill the Soviet Union fell, it recieved massive amounts of aid. It improved to a certain level, but remained entirely dependant. When the Cold War ended and the money flow stopped, it almost collapsed. It suffered greatly. Why? Because it became dependant upon help rather than seeking to become self-sufficient. And unlike most African states, Cuba has had a long time of stability.
If you want to claim 'oh well Cuba is a dictatorship', where do you think the aid will be going if not authoritarian regimes? Africa's countries are ran mostly by tin pot dictators. Only recently we saw Kenya fall into a grave crisis, and it was held up as a stable, developing state.
Now why don't you show me a success for aid. Where a country that has almost no middle class and no real civic culture, as this is where generic aid goes (as opposed to disaster relief). The only places where aid was of significant benefit was Marshall Aid. However, those states that benefitted from it had middle classes and had proud civic traditions. And it was 10% of the US revenue, not 1%.