That is why war is to be avoided. It is full of inequities. But not at all costs.
War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.
John Stuart Mill - English economist & philosopher (1806 - 1873)
Now accidents are measurable and fairly regular. War is something else.
The Austrian Corporal could have been stopped in 1936 by a Company. (so say him and his generals) by 1941 it took something like 20 or 30 million men in arms. The lesson has been burned into world politicians. Now it is hard to reckon things prevented. But so far folks running the show are unwilling to take the risk. I happen to agree. YMMV.
So fighting terrorists is not just about immediate costs. It is about not letting things get out of hand.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Exactly David and that is why it is unfair to demand everybody else to insure themselves against getting injured by another driver. You are the one ending up paying for his mistakes. That is IMHO worse than communism!
Diogenes wrote:MSimon's posts have knocked it out of the park, but for what it's worth, Walter Williams (Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Prominent columnist) agrees with me about that right to travel buisness.
True rights, such as those in our Constitution, or those considered to be natural or human rights, exist simultaneously among people. That means exercise of a right by one person does not diminish those held by another. In other words, my rights to speech or travel impose no obligations on another except those of non-interference. If we apply ideas behind rights to health care to my rights to speech or travel, my free speech rights would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with an auditorium, television studio or radio station. My right to travel freely would require government-imposed obligations on others to provide me with airfare and hotel accommodations.
For Congress to guarantee a right to health care, or any other good or service, whether a person can afford it or not, it must diminish someone else’s rights, namely their rights to their earnings. The reason is that Congress has no resources of its very own. Moreover, there is no Santa Claus, Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy giving them those resources. The fact that government has no resources of its very own forces one to recognize that in order for government to give one American citizen a dollar, it must first, through intimidation, threats and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American. If one person has a right to something he did not earn, of necessity it requires that another person not have a right to something that he did earn.
To argue that people have a right that imposes obligations on another is an absurd concept. A better term for new-fangled rights to health care, decent housing and food is wishes. If we called them wishes, I would be in agreement with most other Americans for I, too, wish that everyone had adequate health care, decent housing and nutritious meals. However, if we called them human wishes, instead of human rights, there would be confusion and cognitive dissonance. The average American would cringe at the thought of government punishing one person because he refused to be pressed into making someone else’s wish come true.
None of my argument is to argue against charity. Reaching into one’s own pockets to assist his fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else’s pockets to do so is despicable and deserves condemnation.
You could apply the same argument to raising a standing army, employing police, fire and other safety officials, the social security program, welfare, unemployment insurance, the fdic, even the fed.
Frankly the argument doesn't hold any water. The constitution doesn't guarantee one freedom from paying taxes that are then used for the public good, and requiring insurance is just a non-cash tax on driving. Suck it up and pay for the insurance like everyone else.
Um. Rights I exercise do not diminish your rights. OTOH my "right" to food and shelter may require me to steal some or all of your money. Of course I will do it in a proper way. I'll get the proper votes and have government goons do my dirty work. I sure hope you don't mind because me and my representatives have decided my welfare is more important than yours. And of course we have decided in the name of fairness that you have no right to the fruits of your labor. But me and my banker friends, we are the ones with real rights.
In other words you have no concept of natural rights.
Engineering is the art of making what you want from what you can get at a profit.
Ok firstly, any state mandating insurance is a fascist state. We dont mandate it here in New Hampshire (and, not coincidentally, insurance premiums are a small fraction of those charged in mandatory insurance states, because the companies actually have to compete for business).
Secondly, the current state of affairs is due to New Deal era laws and court rulings that apply "interstate commerce" regulation to anything that anybody does. Prior to that, drivers licenses could only be legally mandated for people who drove vehicles in commerce, i.e. taxi and limo drivers, bus drivers, paid truck drivers, etc because the state does not have the constitutional right to regulate how a person navigates the public byways in their personal conveyance.
Thus, prior to the invention of the automobile, horse riders could not be required to have a license to drive a horse, nor one's family wagon, carriage, or sleigh. If you had a wagon that was used in commerce, like a vegetable wagon, an ice wagon, etc then you had to pay a fee to register it for such. This did mean that farmers had to register their wagons.
There was also no real consumer economy at the time of the early auto industry. People who owned cars tended to use them for professional reasons: doctors making house calls, for instance.
These licenses were licenses to regulate and tax commerce, not personal travel or use of mechanical vehicles for such.
If you ever worked for a taxi, limo, or bus company, and got a look at their records, you'd notice a few key legal terms, which represent different things.
For instance, there is the vehicle owner, the vehicle operator, and the vehicle driver. They are three separate legal positions/definitions. The owner is obviously the person who owns the vehicle. The operator is someone who employs that vehicle as a means of engaging in commerce, but the operator is not the driver. The driver is a different position entirely, the person who actually navigates the vehicle on the public rights of way. One person may wear all three hats, but they are all terms of commerce. A person who does not engage in commerce with a vehicle, but is its owner, who uses it as a personal conveyance, is not an operator or a driver, as those are terms of commerce, the owner does not pay himself to transport himself and/or his family to church on sunday.
What happened was that in the New Deal, the unions and the democrats decided that if you were using your own car to travel around, that you were engaging in commerce negatively by refusing to employ someone to be your driver, that you were acting in the legal position of driver for yourself in an unpaid capacity, but which still impacted commerce by exclusion. Your driving yourself was the cause of unemployment.
If you look at your own drivers license, you will see what your rating is. It should say "operator" to drive a car. See, the state is treating you as an agent of commerce, employing the vehicle to transport yourself and your family around in lieu of employing a taxi company or limosine driver.
Back when I lived in Seattle, my roommate at one time owned a limo business which I drove for on occasion, usually late night airport pickups. He had a customer though, who was a retired gentleman, one of the founders of Boeing and Seafirst Bank, and who owned his own limousine and lived in the Broadmoor neighborhood of Seattle. I was this guys driver also, but on a contract he had with my roommate, and typically just drove him to and from the airport so he could jet down to Palm Springs for tennis with his jet set friends.
Anyways, I didn't have a limo driver cert on my drivers license, which was mandated in Washington state at the time, for for-hire limo company drivers, but this didn't apply to driverse of private limos. Private limos also did not have to have a sticker to pick up or drop off people at the airport like commercial limos did.
So I am at Sea-Tac one time to pick up this old gent on his way back from Palm Springs when an airport cop sees that this guys private limo doesn't have a sticker, so he starts hassling me, demanding to see my sticker and my limo driver license. He's about to arrest me when the car's owner shows up and we show the airport cop the registration and the owner shows him his ID. The cop still wants to press it, so the old guy pulls out his cellphone and calls the head of the Seattle Port Authority, a personal friend, who then asks to talk to the airport cop, and basically tells him if he likes he job he should pay more attention to the rules about private limos and tells him to let us go....
Thing is, I WAS properly licensed, having an "operator" rating, to drive a car for hire as a taxi or limo driver, but since the owner of the limo did not drive it himself, that he was engaging in commerce with me and legally should fall under the same rules as a public for-hire limo.
Diogenes wrote:MSimon's posts have knocked it out of the park, but for what it's worth, Walter Williams (Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Prominent columnist) agrees with me about that right to travel buisness.
You could apply the same argument to raising a standing army, employing police, fire and other safety officials, the social security program, welfare, unemployment insurance, the fdic, even the fed.
Frankly the argument doesn't hold any water. The constitution doesn't guarantee one freedom from paying taxes that are then used for the public good, and requiring insurance is just a non-cash tax on driving. Suck it up and pay for the insurance like everyone else.
My argument (one of my arguments) is that the right to travel is an inherent human right, like that of speech, or the right to peaceably assemble.
Tell me how you feel about a tax on the right to speak?
Were it just a penny per century, the tax would be too high!
Diogenes wrote:MSimon's posts have knocked it out of the park, but for what it's worth, Walter Williams (Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Prominent columnist) agrees with me about that right to travel buisness.
You could apply the same argument to raising a standing army, employing police, fire and other safety officials, the social security program, welfare, unemployment insurance, the fdic, even the fed.
Frankly the argument doesn't hold any water. The constitution doesn't guarantee one freedom from paying taxes that are then used for the public good, and requiring insurance is just a non-cash tax on driving. Suck it up and pay for the insurance like everyone else.
My argument (one of my arguments) is that the right to travel is an inherent human right, like that of speech, or the right to peaceably assemble.
Tell me how you feel about a tax on the right to speak?
Were it just a penny per century, the tax would be too high!
1) The tax isn't on your right to travel. It's on your right to operate a motor vehicle.
You can freely walk anywhere you are permitted to go without any kind of interference from the government.
If you want to operate a vehicle (otherwise known as a 6 ton people-killer), you have to get a license, and pay the associated taxes and fees. Tough luck.
2) While you are permitted to travel where you want, that right is limited to public property, and is further constrained by the national interest. For example, do you think that right permits you to freely walk around on nuclear test ranges? How about the Lawrence Livermore national laboratory? NASA? How about the White House?
In short your colorful albeit flawed logic is really just a cover for tax avoidance regardless of consequences to the public good...as usual for conservatives. Pay the fee or get your party into power again to overturn the law. Otherwise stop crying about it. The constitution isn't going to help you unless you get some of that activist adjudication we hear so much about.