[temphn]

Why is the response to incompetence to increase funding? Incompetent businesses go out of business, they don't get more money. Others could do this job better - assuming we even want the job being done. The US became one of the most powerful nations in the world without any IRS for its first hundred plus years, gaining most of its revenue through tariffs rather than taxes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariffs_in_United_States_histor...

[jbooth]

If funding was at one level, and you decrease it, and the backlog of undone case work increases afterwards, it points to a pretty simple conclusion.

I'm talking very specifically about administrative issues here, philosophical musing about the nature of taxation is besides my point (and more generally completely unhelpful when it comes to actually getting stuff done).

If people want to eliminate IRS case work by eliminating a bunch of these 501(c)(abcdewhatever) categories, that's fine by me. But the work exists and it needs to get done. The way you get it done is by people doing it, for salary.

As far as 'others could do this job better', you're suspicious of taxes and want to hand it off to a private contractor or something? I can't say that that makes sense to me.

[ryanisinallofus]

"without any IRS for its first hundred plus years"

And rivers caught on fire, slavery was rampant, women couldn't vote, children died in factories. Don't romanticize history.

The idea may work, it may not. It's certainly my favorite libertarian idea after ending the drug war. But don't "look back to the good old days" like they were better. They weren't.

[samatman]

Unless you're relating the end of slavery, women's suffrage etc to the founding of the IRS, this is a fallacious argument. It's perfectly reasonable to imply or outright state that some things worked better in the past.

I consider 19th century architecture objectively superior to that of the 20th century. You may disagree, but cholera is not relevant to that discussion.

[ryanisinallofus]

Most 19th century architecture is completely unfeasible to build today. If only we had more of those non-union wage slaves to build are elaborate monuments like the good old days!

Dubai has that now I guess.

[_delirium]

If you think of how private-sector companies manage their internal divisions, sometimes the answer to problems in a division is to increase funding. For example, if your products have major safety problems, it might be because your quality-control and risk-assessment groups are understaffed, and increasing the funding you allocate to that task, rather than decreasing it, might be a rational response.

[dpeck]

The US really didn't have much to do on the world stage in its first 100 years. Separated from the rest of the "civilized" world by a few thousand miles of ocean in each direction it was able to be the biggest player in the western hemisphere, but the game was much smaller.