From Libertarian Michael A. LaFerrara:
Letter published in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, March 26, 2018, page 6 (not available online as of this writing):
It’s called paying back to society
To the letter writer who wants to know why he should have to pay for NJ transit upgrades when he doesn’t use mass transit (“Murphy’s taxes will eat up federal tax cuts,” March 23): All the people who do use mass transit could be in their own cars, which would make everyone’s lives more miserable because of the massive increase in traffic and pollution. And why should you pay school taxes even though you don’t have kids in school? Because the kids in school today will be the health care providers and scientists and engineers, etc., who will be running the world that you live in tomorrow. That is what a society does.
Barbara Egger, Lakewood
This is one of the most devious arguments for forced redistribution of wealth.
Society doesn’t “do” anything. “Society” is an abstraction denoting a number of individuals. Only individuals think, learn, work, and trade. The premise behind catchphrases like “paying back to society” is that some people must be forced to hand their money over to the state, so that some politically connected others can use the gun-backed machinery of government to legally force their values on unwilling individuals.
“Why should I, a construction tradesman, subsidize a professional who works out of the same office day after day? Why does he rate a lower fare at my expense?” – Old Man with Enfeebled Morals
Here! Here!
As a rail user, why should my tax dollars go to subsidize the building and maintenance of roads?
Why should my taxes pay for firefighters and their equipment when they just go and waste those resources not directly helping me and my own? My house isn’t burning down.
And water, right? I drink nothing but Culligan water and Well Water. Why do I have to pay money toward the public water everyone else uses?
Don’t get me started on the United States Postal Service and the waste of resources they have setting up post offices in the middle of no where towns. I don’t know anyone in those places and I will never go there, so obviously they shouldn’t have postal services AND if they need them, do it themselves like INDIVIDUALS.
Okay, I’m of course being facetious. Reading Grandpa Simpson’s diatribes and broken pretzel logic really gets to me. Society is an abstraction denoting a number of individuals? Right, maybe in the simplest of terms. A society is no different than a gaggle of geese, since a gaggle is just denoting a number of geese. Hey wait, maybe that is an apt comparison… A gaggle of geese band together for their collective good. It’s easier for the gaggle of geese to have and raise baby geese and thrive under the umbrella and watchful eye of a group of likeminded geese rather than just a single goose or a pair of selfish goose parents. Kind of like how a society of people band together to do things for their collective good and succeed far more frequently than a pair of selfish parents… or a selfish, I’ve Got Mine After a Career Working For the Government Grandpa.
When I read diatribes like this, I’m always brought back to an often mischaracterized speech President Obama made. “You didn’t make that” is often lifted out of context to label Obama some sort of socialist/communist. The point and context of the speech was that people don’t create, innovate, manufacture, and/or succeed in a vacuum. Without the security, access to resources, infrastructure, and health of society an individual cannot do anything. That Libertarian’s Governmentless Utopia that is Somalia should be overflowing with gajillionaires, right?
“State schools are not a feature of a free society.” – Mr. Went to Public School and Never Learned About what Education Was Like Before Public School
No, a feature of a Free Society… which, hey we’re talking about that abstract concept of society again, but this time it’s important because it’s ‘Free’… anyways, a feature of a Free Society allows a parent to decide if they want to send their kid to the public school. Home Schooling is a thing. Private Schools exist. Unfortunately there’s a whole Haves vs Have Nots situation that Mr. LaFerrara conveniently ignores.
“In a just society, parents pay for educating their own minor children.” Mr. I Hate the Abstract Concept of Society Unless It is Preceded By An Adjective
You know, some would say or argue that our taxes are paying for educating our own minor children…
“I pay for the education of the doctor, the engineer, the plumber only indirectly as and when I need a doctor’s or an engineer’s or a plumber’s service, through the fees, salaries, or wages of the doctor, engineer, or plumber, when and as I choose.” – Old Man Who Doesn’t Know How Education Works
Oh, I get it now. Mr. LaFerrara is confused. He thinks paying his Medicare Co-Pay at the Doctor retroactively pays for that person’s medical schooling. Or when he calls 1-800-PLUMBERS, that’s paying for a person’s trade school education.
“To justify the moral abomination through collectivist sloganeering—like “paying back to society” or “That is what a society does”—just adds an unhealthy dose of dishonesty to the moral abomination.” – Grandpa Hater of Non-Randian Buzzwords
I doubt he sees the irony in his screeds.
As usual, an incredibly short-sighted piece, as befits a non-consequentialist. He underestimates not only the benefits that these social features provide, but the extent of the cost/benefit analysis that other people have conducted on them. It can’t all be easily quantified in dollar signs, though, so I can understand why he struggles.
Furthermore, whatever poor arguments or programs he accurately skewers, he does not begin to make a case for abandoning subsidization or taxation altogether in favor of his own system (or lack thereof), nor can he explain why a libertarian system would not inevitably gravitate back toward what we have. Most of us (including Aristotle and the Founding Fathers, whom he claims to admire) have and recognize that we have more values than simply maximizing legal freedom and keeping as much of our present personal property as possible. There’s no sense in pretending otherwise or advocating for something that would utterly fail to promote those other values.
I do not pretend to know exactly how the US would look if it became the libertarian paradise he imagines, but it’s not at all difficult to imagine one in which most of us are only educated as necessary to fulfill our occupational roles, according to what best makes money, or according to what our religious region of the country actually offers in the absence of any secular state mandate. Between that and trying to improve our current system so that it *can* be a better value for its cost, I’ll take the latter any day.