Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar
Against Nanny Government
RECEIVED Mon., May 3, 2004
Dear Editor,
It is no "presumption" that the federal government has no role in providing social welfare programs ["Page Two," April 30]. It was the intent that the individual states would set up the social welfare programs they saw fit to provide. Read Federalist 45 and the 10th Amendment.
You can whine about the PATRIOT Act, but individual liberties are just as threatened by social programs we are forced into for "our own good." Would Ashcroft need a warrant for abortion records with a nationalized health care system? Would not those records be government property? You do not trust the government with access to library-reading lists but trust them with access to your blood test or control of your retirement? With government money comes government control. Be thankful "we are not getting all the government we are paying for."
Taxation as a means to redistribute wealth is a faulty idea. It presumes that there is a finite amount of wealth and government's role is to spread it around. In fact there is an infinite amount of potential wealth in the world. It was not the redistribution of the wealth of the J.P. Morgans that created the Bill Gates and Michael Dells. It was the creation of new wealth.
"The utopian ideas of leveling and a community of goods are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown. [These ideas] are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional." – Samuel Adams
Western Europe's high taxation has not kept their social programs solvent nor truly redistributed wealth. There are few European equivalents to Dell or Intel. Instead there are the same old names, such as Siemens.
I prefer the uncertain but unlimited individual opportunities for success than the guarantee of a collective, forced, mediocre existence by a nanny government.
It is no "presumption" that the federal government has no role in providing social welfare programs ["Page Two," April 30]. It was the intent that the individual states would set up the social welfare programs they saw fit to provide. Read Federalist 45 and the 10th Amendment.
You can whine about the PATRIOT Act, but individual liberties are just as threatened by social programs we are forced into for "our own good." Would Ashcroft need a warrant for abortion records with a nationalized health care system? Would not those records be government property? You do not trust the government with access to library-reading lists but trust them with access to your blood test or control of your retirement? With government money comes government control. Be thankful "we are not getting all the government we are paying for."
Taxation as a means to redistribute wealth is a faulty idea. It presumes that there is a finite amount of wealth and government's role is to spread it around. In fact there is an infinite amount of potential wealth in the world. It was not the redistribution of the wealth of the J.P. Morgans that created the Bill Gates and Michael Dells. It was the creation of new wealth.
"The utopian ideas of leveling and a community of goods are as visionary and impracticable as those which vest all property in the Crown. [These ideas] are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional." – Samuel Adams
Western Europe's high taxation has not kept their social programs solvent nor truly redistributed wealth. There are few European equivalents to Dell or Intel. Instead there are the same old names, such as Siemens.
I prefer the uncertain but unlimited individual opportunities for success than the guarantee of a collective, forced, mediocre existence by a nanny government.
Carl Anderson
