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Excerpt from an interview of Robert Putnam, whose writing tends to be data-rich (for those who like data to back up assertions):

About 100 years ago Americans invented the public high school. The invention of the public high school was the idea that everybody in town would pay for the high school, even if you didn’t have kids. Lots of upper-middle-class people voted to tax themselves to pay for other people’s kids. Nobody thought it was socialist. Why is that any different from voting now to say that people like me should pay more taxes to spend on early childhood education, to spend on a little more Goodnight Moon time for lower-class kids? My bet, what I’m spending my time doing, is thinking how we can frame this issue in a way that won’t seem like socialism or Scandinavia. This is what we do in America. We’ve often, many times in our history, agreed that it was good for society to invest in other people’s kids.

Date: 2014-04-26 01:38 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] randomdreams.livejournal.com
From observation and conversation, my summary of the opposing position is: a lot of people have lived in a comfortable civilized society for long enough that they don't comprehend the fundamental changes that would happen without public funding of things like education and roads. They're convinced that they, personally, could do just fine without those things, and would prefer to have the money (or, in some cases, concede that public goods do exist but that the harm caused by the government having the ability to tax them exceeds the good caused by the usage of that money.)
They envision a world run by force, where you take what you can, and hold what you can, and if someone with more guns shows up and kills you for what you have that just means you needed more guns yet.

I'm not sure how to argue with this point of view other than "that world would suck" but since they're convinced that they'd be the survivors, they think it would be fine.

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