St. Paul and I Agree...
 Taxation is not theft:  "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves." -- Romans 13   The key idea implicit here, and the one that turned me on the subject of whether or not taxation is theft, is that "every soul" owes  obedience to the "governing authorities." Now, if that is a debt I truly owe , then, when those authorities levy the taxes they need to do the job of governing, I owe  them those taxes, and attempts to collect them certainly do not constitute acts of theft. And obviously it doesn't matter at all, from this point of view, whether or not I "signed" any sort of "social contract." (In fact, the history of political thought since the Reformation can be read as an attempt to find a secular rep...
Without trying to justify the demand for unconditional surrender, I believe any solution that could achieve the same end with fewer casualties would be preferable.
ReplyDeleteSince there was a surrender dialogue in progress, why didn’t Truman give the Japanese a little demonstration of the bomb’s potential, and at the same time threaten a much larger population?
After a demo of what “little boy” can do, I think the dialogue would have gone like this:
US: Unconditional Surrender or it’s Tokyo, downtown…
Japan: You wouldn’t!
US: Have you seen Dresden?
Yeah, you know, Eisenhower and MacArthur both thought the bombing was unnecessary -- hardly peaceniks, you know.
ReplyDeleteThe decision to drop the bomb had nothing do with the war with Japan. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were used to scare the living crap out of Stalin.
ReplyDeleteExcellent article. Interestingly, at the time, conservatives, including ex-presdient Hoover, the Chicago Tribune, Henry Luce and National Review, criticized Truman for dropping the bomb(s). That's progress for you I guess.
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