@Renaldo Dubois,
Renaldo Dubois wrote:
I'm not here to talk about others or myself. That's what stupid people do. Intelligent people exchange ideas.
Perhaps in an ideal world what you say may be true; but people are judged by the ideas they hold, or, to be correct, by the conceptual manifolds they hold as true, or right...
I find it curious that in my dealings with people I find very few that I dislike, and I know some of them hold political views I may disagree with; but it is hard to be social without being sociable, and it is easy enough if one tries to see through the political front to the back of perceived self interest... Like one man said: If they say it is not the money, but the principal of the thing; It's the money!!!
When I look at this country, I see a place where no one, not even the natives hold a clear title... Watching a tv show on America before Columbus, I noticed one Spaniard rejoicing that so many had died from disease, and so had cleared their title to the land...What we most take for granted, that property rights, like other rights, are inalienable is not at all certain... Most of the laws we have in regard to property did not grow out of a fear of commoners who had their own claim to the land, what the Chinese would call Bottom Rights... The laws we have were to give the lords protection from the avarice of kings, and whether people know it or not, they often make reference to such laws... Still, no lord would disagree with the king's power or right to tax... And one fallacy continually presents itself, and that is that the rights of property are some how immutable, and in this, people could not be further from the truth... It is the rich themselves who have most often attacked and amended property rights... Age old Feudalism was changed throughout... The peasants were loaded up with dues, and the kings were often de-fied... The inalienable property of the church was almost everwhere siezed, and the hereditary rights of the commoner to the commons was taken... By what right does anyone any where defend their property to the death, or deny the power of government which stands behind all titles???
Those who would deny government the power to tax destroy the ability of government to protect their property... If it were the property owners who had to raise their own army of esquires as in days of old to protect their lands and chattels, they would find themselves taxed to death... What the government does with its social programs attempts to keep social peace, and to provide for a happy population that does not look with too great an envy at the rich... We may talk all we want about ideas in a proper and civilized manor, and I am all for it... We should also try to realize that at the end of our ideas may hang tyranny or slavery, that the rich having ownership of the whole country may dispose of the constitution as a practical rather than a hypothetical matter, because it offers an impediment to the ownership of humanity in an increasingly dark age...
There is always some reality in every idea, though Ideas are but analogies of reality, and hardly exact... With the ideas people hold dear they paint a characature of themselves, and others -they paint with the same brush... I don't want to do that... I want to see the good in people, and recognize the really minor points that divide citizen from citizen, and human from humanity...
