Fever dreams of men and guns
by digby
Let’s talk about one of the other flaky GOP weirdos running for president shall we?
At a campaign event earlier this year, Elizabeth Warren told supporters that there is “nobody in this country who got rich on his own.”
“You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that maurauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory,” she said.
ABC News’s Terry Moran asked Ron Paul why Warren was wrong.
“Because she’s a socialist,” Paul replied. “She wants the government to do all this.”
“Educating children is socialism?” Moran wondered.
“That is a socialist idea, that it should be collective,” Paul explained. “I preach home schooling, and private schooling and competition in schools. But what she forgets — she’s right. You know, by the use of force, the government comes with a gun and they take money and they build a highway that, incidentally, you can use because you don’t have any other choices.”
“So in Ron Paul’s ideal America, there would be no public highways, no public education?” Moran pressed. “There’d be no public air traffic control system? There’d be no public protection for workers in coal mines?”
“That’s an overstatement because it might be a lot better,” Paul said. “I think France has a private air traffic controllers.”
(I don’t think that’s true. In fact, I think they are public servants who are allowed to retire at the age of 50. Quelle horreur!)
So when’s the last time someone from the government came to you with a gun and forced you to pay for a road? Yeah, I know it’s the libertarian way of saying that the government forces you to pay taxes under the threat of jail. But really, he sounds like a nut when he says that. And it’s very misleading, reducing the argument to the “men with guns” coming to get you for not paying taxes when the threat of “greedy men with pinkslips” and “rich men with monopolies” is a far graver threat to the average person’s daily tangible freedom than the abstract horror of having to pay taxes for services from which you might or might not personally reap the benefit.
Honestly, sometimes I think that these libertarians must live in some alternate universe where they never have to live under the boot of the real people with real power in most people’s lives. Most of life isn’t a democracy.
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