Originally Posted by roachboy

and you only read the last sentence or two of my post.

you act as though the state was some voluntary association that meets around the woodstove in order to decide whether we should have a fire department this week or whether we care this week about women who are raped enough to not take care of a couple telephone poles or deal with a neighbor's chipmunk problem. and as if the pool of resources that a state works with is the quarters that we all throw into a spitoon or some such.

there's nothing about that which enables a discussion: you set it up so that you either agree with your premise and then there "is a discussion" or you don't, in which case "you have poor communication skills"


there is a broader question that you could ask, which has to do with whether it makes sense to import micro-level understanding to thinking about how a state allocates resources---but you'd have to want to have a discussion about that. and you don't---you assume your way of posing the question is coherent.