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I think I possibly need to clarify my terms a bit better, following the last post.
As I said in a comment there, I believe that a government's first and foremost role is to make sure everybody has the things they *need*. This goes double for children, as it's generally not in any way their fault that they are in whatever economic situation they are in, and ought to be given exactly the same level of oppertunity as each other. But nobody should starve or die of easily treatable medical conditions or sleeping rough, unless they have made it absolutely impossible for the government to help them (i.e. they're violent and abusive to social workers and actively refuse help etc).
This includes some treading on people's freedoms in the category of 'making a safe environment for people to live in' - the balance is quite hard here, because the principle 'your right to swing your fist ends when my nose starts - unless you have explicit permission' is really hard to apply over all of the things people do to each other. But in general I don't think the government should enforce 'values' or 'social norms'.
Obviously governments do need to have some kind of thought about economic matters - making sure the country is either self-sufficient or has the money to import things which are needed. Generally this gets quite mired up in corruption, even of the mostly innocent variety everyone indulges in (this policy is better for me / my family / my friends / the companies I'm investing in / the compaines I need to purchase things from to maintain public services), and I'm not sure how to get around this. I do know, from study at A-level ecomonics type level, that the assumption that concentrating on economic growth is necessary to increase standard of living is not backed up by the facts, and reasonably well-off countries with high taxation and good public services tend to score highest on all forms of standard-of-living indexes. (So even if there is a requirement at some stage of development to concentrate on economic growth, the UK is beyond that point.)
The main issue with politics today, however, is that most people have got the message 'look at all this money they're taking from me in my pay check - income tax is bad and I don't want it to happen, so I'll vote for whoever will cut taxes or at least not increase them'. And they do not connect this with their other pet peeve, 'public schools are no good and hospitals are appalling, and as for public transport and the road network it's a joke'. So no party who has the willpower to raise taxes and sort out public services has a hope of getting elected, and we get 'stealth taxes' that are much less fair and equitable than income tax but are less noticable to people (for instance for VAT the shop gets blamed not the government for the price increase, also VAT impacts poor people much more than rich people because it's a higher percentage of what they have that gets taken from them, unlike income tax which is progressive (richer people pay a larger percentage 'cos they don't need it as much)).
Anyhow. I must pack for Oxonmoot now, so I'll be back for more fun political debates on Sunday.
As I said in a comment there, I believe that a government's first and foremost role is to make sure everybody has the things they *need*. This goes double for children, as it's generally not in any way their fault that they are in whatever economic situation they are in, and ought to be given exactly the same level of oppertunity as each other. But nobody should starve or die of easily treatable medical conditions or sleeping rough, unless they have made it absolutely impossible for the government to help them (i.e. they're violent and abusive to social workers and actively refuse help etc).
This includes some treading on people's freedoms in the category of 'making a safe environment for people to live in' - the balance is quite hard here, because the principle 'your right to swing your fist ends when my nose starts - unless you have explicit permission' is really hard to apply over all of the things people do to each other. But in general I don't think the government should enforce 'values' or 'social norms'.
Obviously governments do need to have some kind of thought about economic matters - making sure the country is either self-sufficient or has the money to import things which are needed. Generally this gets quite mired up in corruption, even of the mostly innocent variety everyone indulges in (this policy is better for me / my family / my friends / the companies I'm investing in / the compaines I need to purchase things from to maintain public services), and I'm not sure how to get around this. I do know, from study at A-level ecomonics type level, that the assumption that concentrating on economic growth is necessary to increase standard of living is not backed up by the facts, and reasonably well-off countries with high taxation and good public services tend to score highest on all forms of standard-of-living indexes. (So even if there is a requirement at some stage of development to concentrate on economic growth, the UK is beyond that point.)
The main issue with politics today, however, is that most people have got the message 'look at all this money they're taking from me in my pay check - income tax is bad and I don't want it to happen, so I'll vote for whoever will cut taxes or at least not increase them'. And they do not connect this with their other pet peeve, 'public schools are no good and hospitals are appalling, and as for public transport and the road network it's a joke'. So no party who has the willpower to raise taxes and sort out public services has a hope of getting elected, and we get 'stealth taxes' that are much less fair and equitable than income tax but are less noticable to people (for instance for VAT the shop gets blamed not the government for the price increase, also VAT impacts poor people much more than rich people because it's a higher percentage of what they have that gets taken from them, unlike income tax which is progressive (richer people pay a larger percentage 'cos they don't need it as much)).
Anyhow. I must pack for Oxonmoot now, so I'll be back for more fun political debates on Sunday.
