patrick.net

Expat says

The politicians who said these things are obviously commies and their opinions show they should be driven from office and kicked out of America.

Or maybe they should run off and become priests, rabbis or imams preaching their religious values instead of becoming politicians?

Conservatives are already more generous than Liberals when it comes to donating time and money to various charities. So we are not interested in raising our taxes to make up for cheap-skate and greedy Liberals who don't volunteer their time and money.

Government should provide a very basic safety net. Just enough money to keep you off the street, but not enough to be comfortable.

Private institutions like charities and religious organizations should provide the rest.

Heraclitusstudent says

Investments mean... buying stuff right? As in: money spent on people doing work, who then turn around and spend that money on other things.
Apparently there is not enough of that going on that the gov feels the need to do it itself. Massive quantities of it.
Why? Isn't the money going in a circle? If not where is the money getting stuck, not being spent?

In a genuine market economy, someone investing in machinery or a factory can realistically expect products turned out by the machinery and factory down the road can more than service the debt and interest . . . i.e. the goods turned out by the machinery and factory down the road can hold down the price inflationary effect of new money created by that time to service the debt payment. In the Keynesian model ignoring the medium to long term inflationary effect of fiat money injection (it takes time for money to propagate through the economy to raise price levels, a delay effect that makes Keynesian scam appear workable on paper), government printing of money to spend on projects that do not generate positive return would result in no new increased products to offset the new money, so despite the nominal increase in money the total purchasing power is lower after adjusting for inflation simply because goods/services are less available after the mal-investments / capital-consumptions.

Heraclitusstudent says

You just need to read your credit card fine prints, or medical payments fine prints, or any such lawyer talk applied to doing business with people not as smart as they think they are. That ought to convince a reasonable man that robbing people is indeed an art.

Notice, those licensed monopolies / oligopolies are created by government regulations. I agree with you that they are robbing people. Doesn't mean however creating more robbery schemes would somehow magically make the situation better. The real productive members of the society would be even more disincentivized to work if we add more robbers into the mix.