Quote:I've never said you can't have military, police and firefighters, I've said in order to have fringe benefits post employment you have to accept it can only be done through socialist programs.

 

Maybe no one would join the military, police or fire departments without these benefits, maybe they would who knows. For the last time all I've said is you can't have those programs with out accepting social redistribution.

 

That seems to hit a nerve with a good number of people.

Those benefits are handed out for a performance of a service, and oftentimes are part of a contractual agreement between two consenting parties. Those kinds of benefits sound reasonable enough to me. If I'm in the Military and I bust my [BLEEP] for this Country for 20 years straight, some kind of benefit for all of that hard work and sacrifice sounds fair to me. I don't even think that, that is socialist at all. As an individual I, and myself alone, worked for those benefits and it wasn't like the Government forced me to do that job and accept those benefits in the first place. Unless of course, we're talking about a draft based system in the military which nobody wants to go back to.

 

I'll admit. Maybe I'm wrong, but when you have former military members and fellow conservatives/libertarians telling you that the system that you want to implement is either wrong, or just not practical; and that a benefit system is either justified or not socialist, that's when you know that you're on the wrong side of a debate. I also think that people have been looking at this too much in terms of moral relativism.

 

 

Eric, I think that the way in which you approached this topic was not appropriate. I'll leave it at that. I think that everyone's just about had enough of this thread. We went from talking about the military's view of Obama, to the military, to talking about saluting, then it diverged into talking about military benefits and pay, then "selective socialism", then different political viewpoints, then privatization, and even a weird moment when we started talking about 9/11 and whether the steel beams from the twin towers melted or not. Lots of mudslinging, lots of accusations, and lots of fighting.

 

 

 

DragonFury, you know what to do.

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