Quote from: caballo loco
Quote from: Freeper on November 11, 2010, 05:30:12 pm
Of all federal employees they are the only ones who produce something.
I beg to differ
Please explain. Who else produces--or secures--our freedom? If you don't have that, you have nothing!
You're moving the goal posts there, that is not the quoted part of the proposition put forward by Freeper to which CL was responding.
Preserving freedom, for that matter, is a service, and actually an indirect but desired result of the Federal military establishment, whose first order service is simply neutralization of foreign military threats by large scale use of whip-ass or at least the credible ability to do same in the minds of our adversaries. Many parts of the Federal government can lay claim to 'securing our freedom,' as much as the military can - DOJ, Congress, State, parts of Commerce, parts of Interior, and even (ptui) EEOC for instance. Other parts can claim their purpose is to protect the freedom and rights of the population from abuses by the few, such as the Federal Courts, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, parts of Commerce and Agriculture, parts of FAA, and even (double ptui) EPA.
The idea that the military is the only part of the Federal government worth paying for is a silly exaggeration. If we really went that way, we'd start looking a lot like Yugoslavia in 1992. Our stable and sometimes-annoying governmental structure mutually interacts with our economy in a much more complex system than the Paulistas and other oversimplifiers want to pretend. Screwing with it on a large and drastic scale would have second-order effects on the economy that would make the current dead-dog recovery's cataleptic response to simple tax rate uncertainty look like a damn' gold rush.
