E Pluribus Unum

[Ted King]

I'd like to reinforce that in the OP I was talking about the open public sphere of interactions. I was focused on markets that are open to the public (because that is where the recent push in extending religious freedom has been), but I think the basic rationale applies to the other big actor in the public sphere - government. We pay taxes to maintain the government part of the public sphere. Some of the tax money we pay to the government goes for the government to do things we don't want it to do - including things we think are morally wrong. I morally objected to the Vietnam war and I knew that some of the taxes I paid were going to pay for that war and I could have chosen to withhold paying taxes because of that. I actually thought about doing it. But then I realized that if we each only paid for all of government on an a la carte basis, the whole thing would collapse pretty quickly. I didn't want to pay for a war that I strongly morally opposed, but the value of maintaining the government was too valuable to give up so I paid. I paid the price it takes to make one out of many.

Fortunately, we still have the wonderful thing that is a mostly functioning though semi-corrupt representative democracy. So when the government does things we don't want it to do and that we don't want to pay taxes for, we can use the election process to change what the government does. When it's working anywhere near the way it should, then what the government does is a rough reflection of what more people than not want it to do. When it's working right, it's about persuasion and compromise. In many specific ways it fails to function that way, but I think relative to the way of lot of governments function in the world, this one ain't too bad. Now if I could only persuade more people to think about issues the way I do.