My response: But you're paid with those taxes.
His response: Oh, right. <subject change>
I live in a military town, 20k people work directly for the base (there are only 120k people in the county, 250k in the counties most of the employees live in). They rail against the fat, then when furloughs happened last year railed against that. No shit, you want the government to spend less, you've got to take a pay cut or a program has to get cut. You're consistently late on delivering equipment and completing jobs, you're the ones that'll get cut. And the safety record, the morons think it's government interference (damn OSHA!) to insist on PPE [edit: personal protective equipment], and don't wear it so their kids end up with heavy metal poisoning when they carry the crap home on their clothes.
Personal protective equipment (PPE) refers to protective clothing, helmets, goggles, or other garments or equipment ... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_protective_equipment )
Somebody's going to be getting paid for doing nothing - it might as well be me.
But it is doublethink if you hold other people in contempt for getting benefits from tax revenue, or if you think they are immoral for doing so.
For example, I think Ayn Rand's position was not just that "looting" is bad for the country, but that it is immoral and that doing it makes you a bad person. A Randite who made special efforts to get any kind of money from the government would either have to think of themselves as a looter, or make a special exception for themselves.
Are you then looting somebody every time you make a cash withdrawal?
Social Security, on the other hand, is a "pay as you go" program. When you contribute money into the Social Security trust fund, it is used to satisfy payments to current recipients. If it's still solvent and operating when you retire or become disabled, then you can expect to receive benefits similarly (though, technically, retirement/"old age" and disability benefits come from different funds).
Moreover, if the fund were to go insolvent — or Congress were to shut the program down — tomorrow, you would have no recourse. (Whereas with bank deposits, you have recourse at least up to the FDIC insured maximum.) If you renounce your US citizenship, or decide to fund your retirement yourself, you don't somehow magically get back the money you contributed, and you're still subject to payroll taxes in the latter case.
That's now how it works. The reason you get those annual pamphlets from Social Security Administration is to know exactly what you're entitled to. It's highly dependent on your rate and consistency of contributions.
> or decide to fund your retirement yourself, you don't somehow magically get back the money you contributed
Not sure what you're saying. When you reach proper age, you're entitled to Social Security payouts as long as you've contributed into the system the way that was intended. A lot of people fund their own retirements through 401(k), annuities or personal savings, that does not disqualify them from Social Security.
PS: congress is just as capable of shutting down the FDIC as the SSA
Either it's a trivial point that applies pretty broadly outside of SS, or you meant something more significant and I'm interested in knowing what that is.
Ayn Rand, and any other person who has become independently wealthy in a way that has nothing to do with the government, can despise looters and be consistent. Government workers in particular cannot.
Or someone like John Kerry - both independently wealthy and a government worker?
It's quite possible to be the user of the system due to the lack of other alternatives and oppose it in principle. People with mortgages or shares do not necessarily support corrupt Wall Street practices and financial institutions getting "too big to fail", yet benefit from low mortgage rates or bullish runs in the stock market.
It's easy to say that a truly just person would not work in an industry that benefitted from tax dollars they would rather not have paid, but considering that the government tends to overpay, it is often the best position for one to be in.
If you worked for the TSA, you would also have sworn an oath to the Constitution.
> It's easy to say that a truly just person would not work in an industry that benefitted from tax dollars they would rather not have paid, but considering that the government tends to overpay, it is often the best position for one to be in.
So, some people who have sworn an oath to the Constitution should optimize their personal income even when that means benefitting from things they see as a contrary to the Constitution, while others shouldn't?
I believe my point still stands for all those federal contractors who have not sworn such an oath, but are similarly suckling off of the federal teat.
Contractors don't.
> I believe my point still stands for all those federal contractors who have not sworn such an oath, but are similarly suckling off of the federal teat.
Its not necessarily incoherent (but, still, IMO, somewhat odd) to argue that it is immoral to choose to benefit from violations of the Constitution only if you have sworn a special oath. That argument isn't about the Constitution, just the binding nature of oaths.
The oath of office is perhaps a thinner line than I'm making it out to be, but there's a larger point to be made there about the role of the federal government, the incentives of office, etc.
That said, I'm high (low?) on Valium at the moment, so I'm in no shape to argue it at the moment.
Do you shun others when they fail at it? Do you respond poorly when someone calls you out for having the same problems? Then you're somewhere in that hypocrisy/doublethink territory. (from what you've written it sounds like you're in the first group, not the second.)
It's really a lot about the degree and self-awareness of the individual. A federal employee is not a hypocrite for wanting smaller government. A federal employee is a hypocrite/doublethinker for failing to acknowledge that they want a smaller government, their program is too large or wasteful (F-35!) and that they should be affected by cuts.
brb gotta murder someone.
"We need to shrink the government!"
Sequestration happens
"Well not those specific things I like!"
Doesn't that imply then that those bits that shouldn't have been shrunk are therefore not part of what they think is "the government"?
Considering that the list of things that usually people who want to shrink the government think should be exempted usually includes the military, I find that particularly troublesome.
No, what you are doing is demonstrating the fallacy of division. The proposition "we should shrink government" is not equivalent to, and does not imply, the proposition "we should shrink every individual component of government".
There is a legitimate case to be made that many people who would assert the need to shrink government in aggregate haven't actually considered things sufficiently and would not maintain that position if they considered things program by program, by it is quite wrong to argue that not wanting some particular programs to be cut, by itself, contradicts wanting the government cut in aggregate.
But practically "shrinking government" is used to mean "shrinking the civilian parts of government".
> There is a legitimate case to be made that many people who would assert the need to shrink government in aggregate haven't actually considered things sufficiently and would not maintain that position if they considered things program by program,
This reminds me of an extended conversation I had with a local county politician who ran on a "shrink federal government" platform. I asked him what we should shrink. There are certainly parts of the federal government I'd be in favor of shrinking or cutting. He resisted, he wouldn't answer. I found a high level list of agencies and programs and asked him to run down the list and specify what his platform was.
He refused.
He'd get up and give a speech about the excesses of government and the deficit and all that. So I put together a list of what I'd like to see cut or what I thought would be okay to cut. I was able to provided a rough budget that cut the deficit in half and calculated out a small tax increase that would end the deficit and provide a small surplus that would simply be used to pay down the debt and then simply be returned as tax returns every year.
He refused.
Finally somebody pulled me aside and explained that he needed the support of the national party to help fund his campaign, and they hadn't publicly specified their platform for cuts yet. So he couldn't specify his support for specific cuts. Which meant the conversation never got beyond "shrink government" as a principle, but not any specifics.
A while later, the same national party put in place an across the board, every department gets the same cut, policy that for a while drove our news reporters to the brink of madness and was deeply deeply unpopular among much of the political spectrum.
So in terms of how the rhetoric "shrink government" gets transformed into specific policy actions, it seems that yes, cutting it across the board is not what's intended, but the hard work of establishing a specific platform hasn't been done yet...probably because intra-party politics means there's no consensus of what that should actually look like.
However as soon as you actually identify a specific programme or department to be cut, you energize a constituency to oppose you. If you identify a couple of dozen things to cut you have a couple of dozen constituencies opposing you. Now they will hire consultants, do soundbites and pay for attack ads to try to take you down. So you don't do it.
Uh... I think I know what you want to mean, but this makes it seem like you have no idea about the principle of civilian authority over the military.
That the people who listen to their media outlets parrot the talking points shows how effective the strategy is.
I'm currently a relatively junior flunky in the Marine Corps, and the GS civilians who work here are hilarious. "We need to cut the fat!" We work at a minor airbase in the middle of nowhere... oh. Oops. Whatever we are, it sure as hell ain't muscle.
"Government spending is out of control" while talking about how they exploit the DTS system to get as much per diem as possible.
"Those lazy people who expect everything to be handed to them, and that Muslim in charge is just giving it all away" while sitting in their chair bitching whenever a Marine disrupts their Freecell session to ask about equipment repair.
I don't even talk to them about it, mostly because the fact that they are capable of this caliber of doublethink indicates that they're beyond saving.