This is Mitch Daniels, the Gov. of Indiana, addressing CPAC yesterday. (Sorry, I can't find an embeddable video.
Here is a non-embeddable one with good sound quality.) One part of his speech I liked very much is this:
We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer. When we do find it necessary, we feel a profound duty to use that dollar as carefully and effectively as possible, else we should never have taken it at all.
This strikes me as the most lucid sort of ethical common sense. When you tax someone, you are coercively taking from then money that they have earned. You should only tax someone for a purpose sufficiently weighty to justify that sort of coercive taking.
Here's another rule that seems obviously true to me: you should only go to war for a reason sufficiently weighty to justify mass killing. More than that: it has to be so important that it justifies actions that you know in advance will kill large numbers of innocent civilians, people who plainly do not deserve violent death.
We can disagree on how weighty a purpose would have to be to justify mass coercion and killing, but it seems undeniable that such actions are morally evil if they do not measure up to these obvious standards, however we might spell these standards out in detail.
It also seems undeniable that, however they are spelled out, these standards are very stringent. If adopted and acted on consistently, there would be few taxes and very, very few wars.
3 comments:
I'd be curious for your take on this:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/14/wisconsin_governor_seeks_major_cuts_in_faculty_benefits_and_union_rights
I am trying to write a blog post on one of the issues involved right now.
BTW, your URL got cut off for some reason. Here is the whole thing. Except for the fact that it only quotes from pro-govt-union sources, this is a pretty informative article. It's to read very critically, though, for that reason:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/14/wisconsin_governor_seeks_major_cuts_in_faculty_benefits_and_union_rights
One good thing I see in the governor's plan: it does away with those phony-baloney "furloughs," which require me to lie (saying I don't work on days when I do work, so that they can then not pay me for that day, while requiring me to do the same work as before).
Oh heck, it got cut off again! I'll put it in my next post, or try to.
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