Daniel M. Ingram:
60% of healthcare in the US is paid for by taxes. Thus, as my salary is generated by healthcare dollars, and as I pay for the DhO, about 60% of the DhO is paid for by US taxes, and really even more of it, as defense contractors for the US government make up a large portion of the insurance revenues that are collected at the hospitals that employ me here in Huntsville, AL, the world center for high tech weapons, defense, and space development.
Taxes pay for schools, roads, retirement, social services, the EPA, NASA, NOA, the FDA (God help them), OSA, DHR, and many other useful and necessary government agencies.
Big science, the sort of science that saves lives, develops new and amazing treatments and medications and makes breakthroughs in cancer and all sorts of other areas wouldn't exist without taxes.
Fusion energy will likely result from very large tax dollars.
It is true that taxes pay for some truly horrible things, like bombing children in Yemen and many other places and many other real crimes against humanity, but the vast majority of tax money isn't slaughtering innocents and destabilizing villages and societies, though that does happen also.
I very much wish that the US government and other governments only did things that were clearly ethical and justified in ways that don't require elaborate mental gymnastics to wrap your twisted mind around, but that is not the case. Still, most taxes are not funding those things.
Hi Dan, that's the trouble, the supply chain for everything we (I'm UK so it's very similar) have is so complicated, even for the nice things, that we often simply don't know what is being done to acquire the resources for it - except for obvious ones like oil and the occasional sweat-shop disaster that gets in the news. It's a massive area of debate around the ethics of resource acquisition, fair trade, conflict free minerals, intellectual property and all the things that go into even the most benevolent medical equipment.
For example I take asthma meds, and I have no idea how my inhalor is made and what had to be done to get it. It's mostly pigmented plastic and steel, so there's oil, gas, possibly nuclear power in the making of it. Maybe a fair deal was cut to get all those things from around the world, maybe not - even the manufacturer may not know. There's transportation, there's storage at the pharmacy, there's transportation for the pharmacist, there's a bewilderingly complex network that gets it to me with the military at the edges of it. Asthma is aggravated by burned fossil fuels, so that network helps make medication even more necessary and is certainly doing violence to my lungs. It all sounds like an
over complex house of cards based on doing things which people object to, and it is.Even a military that isn't doing anything is still a brutal organisation, just by virtue of day to day conduct (my Dad was in the army) and they aren't running on voluntary contributions. Military budgets and deep investigative journalism about how they are spent are now a click away, so it's easy to get an idea of where the money goes.
Trade and industry in Buddha's time were likely quite complex, Silk Road network and all that, but nothing like what we have now.
Yet amongst all that people are still getting enlightened, which is a head spinner it's true.
(I did take note of what you said about marching soldiers and A&P, BTW - do we really know what is going on with people?)