tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7893272060787897238.post9016239880945072929..comments2024-03-19T08:42:45.690-04:00Comments on The Delaware Libertarian: A Thought on Government...Steven H. Newtonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09097470960863103473noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7893272060787897238.post-14335184780493793202009-03-14T20:42:00.000-04:002009-03-14T20:42:00.000-04:00MikoSeveral good points: one of the reasons I exc...Miko<BR/>Several good points: one of the reasons I excluded everything not domestic for the initial question.<BR/><BR/>I think "services" would be reasonably divided into "voluntary" and "required" as you suggest without doing harm to the concept.<BR/><BR/>I tend to view regulation pretty broadly: both meat inspections and prison systems <I>regulate</I> people's behavior.<BR/><BR/>You're right about potential overlap.<BR/><BR/>What I'm playing with here is the idea of developing <I>least-common denominators</I> for all governments....Steven H. Newtonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09097470960863103473noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7893272060787897238.post-75809506113766171172009-03-14T15:10:00.000-04:002009-03-14T15:10:00.000-04:00I'd suggest broadening the category of "taxation" ...I'd suggest broadening the category of "taxation" to include non-financial items. (Call it "tribute," perhaps.) Consider a draft, for example. Service suggests something that the government is offering you (and which hypothetically you could turn down). Regulation suggests that the government is forcing you not to do something. Taxation seems more generally to get at the idea that the government is forcibly taking something away from you, and so seems the most logical place to put it.<BR/><BR/>Although, if we're going to accept the idea that service is a voluntary category, it would need to be split into two to handle distinctions between, say, things you can voluntarily apply for like food stamps and things that you can't turn down like bombing villages overseas. In fact, war seems to be a common denominator in many of the above, so it might be worthwhile to add it as a separate category: regulation being the use of force against people the government considers to be under its jurisdiction, and war the use of force against those that it does not so consider.<BR/><BR/>That said, it'd be quite a stretch to fit attrocities like the Holocaust into any of those categories.<BR/><BR/>Also, there's going to be some overlap: is government-mandated education a service being provided or a regulation being enforced?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com