[burntsushi]

> You're only talking about Western European and North American governments?

The top parent is.

> They're not all that different from governments elsewhere.

This statement is content free. "Different" is sufficiently general in this context as to be completely useless.

> See the interesting thing for me is that the taking of physical property is actually just as likely as taking savings from banks. You and the op seemed to disagree with this, but I don't know what you could use to back that opinion up.

The top parent said

> They would have never gone to a farmer and taken 10% of their grain.

Which is true by observation. Governments in first world countries are demonstrably not doing this.

> If you believe that the discovery of electricity makes me a better person, or even a different one, I don't know what to say to you.

I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. This conversation has nothing to do with electricity or what defines a person to be "better".

[ameister14]

>This statement is content free. "Different" is sufficiently general in this context as to be completely useless.

Please allow me to be more specific. Western European and North American governments are not, in terms of quality of leadership or structure of administration, tangibly different from many governments not present in those regions. Further, seizure of land is not unknown in the US.

If the government isn't particularly different, is it some quality of the people present in those countries that makes you so confident that they wouldn't take physical property?

>Which is true by observation. Governments in first world countries are demonstrably not doing this.

That's an interesting point to make because prior to this instance, governments in the developed world didn't take 10% of deposits, either.

>I don't understand the point you're trying to make here. This conversation has nothing to do with electricity or what defines a person to be "better".

Well, your response to my prior statement about the assumption that social and governmental changes are brought about along with technological changes was "if you say so."

This is generally something people say when they don't agree, but can't or don't want to prove their point. It's a tactic used to undermine the argument of the opposition without presenting a defined counter. I was responding to that.

[burntsushi]

> Please allow me to be more specific. Western European and North American governments are not, in terms of quality of leadership or structure of administration, tangibly different from many governments not present in those regions.

There are despots and tyrants all over the world. They are very tangibly different from Western European and North American governments in terms of quality of leadership or structure of administration.

> Further, seizure of land is not unknown in the US.

We're talking about grain, not land. The specifics of the example are particularly relevant.

> If the government isn't particularly different, is it some quality of the people present in those countries that makes you so confident that they wouldn't take physical property?

I'm not confident at all that they wouldn't take physical property. Once again, this is irrelevant. We aren't talking about probability, or chance, or anything of the sort.

Once again, the top parent is a commentary on cognitive dissonance using factual observations about the world. Governments are not taking grain from farmers, but governments are taking money from banks.

> That's an interesting point to make because prior to this instance, governments in the developed world didn't take 10% of deposits, either.

Well, yes... The top parent was contrasting this with something the top parent believed was morally equivalent, but was not practiced.

> "if you say so." ... This is generally something people say when they don't agree, but can't or don't want to prove their point.

Actually, I meant it as, "I don't care to argue that point because it's irrelevant to the topic of conversation."

[ameister14]

>Money in the bank is not your money anymore...Sure, this time it was not the banks itself but rather the government that did this, but they could only do this because banks and government has stopped seeing money in the bank as belonging to the person who put it there.

See, this is your part about cognitive dissonance. Except, there isn't any cognitive dissonance if governments are just as likely to take grain from farmers as they are to take money from bank accounts. There's no contradiction there.

>They would have never gone to a farmer and taken 10% of their grain. They would have never gone and taken physical property in peoples home. That would had been an complete impossibility.

And this is the part where we start talking about probability, because he's wrong.

>We're talking about grain, not land. The specifics of the example are particularly relevant.

They're actually not. We're talking about virtual property vs. physical property, not grain vs. cash.

It is my position that the lack of physical presence of property does not result in the greater likelihood that the property will be seized, save in instances where the physical property is impossible to seize for some reason. That's all. Governments are supposed to exist to protect the property of their citizenry. Unfortunately, many don't hold that up.