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I don't care if Internet was paid for 100% with government money. I wasn't an intellectual anemic before its inception, and I would certainly not be any more so today without either Internet or government funding thereof. If I had been given the choice to use tax dollars to pay for it, I would have said "no". But I had no such choice -- I was forced to pay, then told (by you no less) that I should be thankful. Internet would not be what it is today without government involvement? Whoopie. Hooray for government. Yawn.
CompuServe didn't seem to need Internet or Government to function fully 10 years before there was so much as a Bitnet (Internet's precursor).
How far back do we go? The role of government in the construction of Eniac? Would nothing get done without government using force on us to make us get it done?
If you object to my appointing myself Gen-X spokesman, you missed the point -- I am as legitimate a spokesperson for my generation as anyone else. Gen-X chooses its own moral leaders, so I chose myself.
If you are making that choice for me (as Hillary Clinton tried to do) then you really don't understand Generation X. The only absolute orthodoxy in my generation, building on the wisdom gleaned from the lessons of the sixties, is the absolute of cultural relativism.
I invoke cultural relativism as an individual, making myself the moral leader of my culture. The only absolute in the relativist paradigm is a proscription on cultural interference. Taxes are such an interference, so to the extent that they are used to pay for any end other than the enforcement of cultural relativism, they are immoral.
Retroactive taxes are almost an act of terror. Ex post facto confiscation is unconstitutional even if it is mislabeled "Civil Law". You go to jail if you break a tax law just as if it were a criminal law. If it waddles and quacks what is it?
I am one of many people in my generation who believe this way, but in keeping with the spirit of my generation, I am the only one who expresses it in exactly these terms.
In 10-15 years, I will look back on what I have written and laugh -- because in that world of lower taxes, less government, and more personal freedom, I will be unable to remember what tyrrany could provoke such intensity.
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