roachboy

slims---i tried to be clear that i was talking about the *premises* of the argument you are making, which you seem to be using but which are not particular to yourself in that they're the starting point for conservative libertarian ideology and it's derivative in neoliberalism. the assumption that you can abstract an individual entirely from the social. a socio-economic actor from the contexts not only in which they play but also from those which enable there to be a game at all is nonsense. it involves a philosophical claim that cannot be justified.

the logic you outline moves in a straight line from these premises, so the choices are either take on the internal workings of your argument as if the premise made sense, or bring up the premise and go after it.

for example, the reason i referred to the arguments against progressive taxation as "pseudo-ethical" is that they presuppose the premise--that you can treat individuals in isolation and not with reference to the contexts that enable them. for your position, taxation is understood with reference to abstract individual 1 from income bracket x juxtaposed against abstract indivdual 2 from income bracket y. from there, the question becomes one of equity and/or limits. in itself that's an ethical type of argument--and from your wording, it seems that's how you view it.

my counter argument departs from quite different premises and leads to a different fundamental relation---that higher rates correspond to a criterion of system maintenance and it's correlate in the argument that those who benefit disproportionately from the organization of the existing socio-economic order owe more to the maintenance of that system that do those who benefit less from that order.

the reason i wanted to cut off the horatio alger move is not only that it's tiresome, not only that it's social darwinism in pop form, but also that attributing being in a position to benefit from the overall organization of the socio-economic order need not involve "virtue" at all--class position can account for it quite apart from any inward qualities for example---but more importantly because the entire idea behind such social-darwinist fables is an apology for any and every social organization that works by translating social arrangements into the language of morality or ethics.

to take a perverse example, if you wanted to play the horatio alger game with stalinism, you could say that beria--head of the secret police (the nkvd, which later became the kgb) was able to accumulate such wealth and power as he had as a function of his superior virtue, his gumption and drive and all that. if you know anything about beria, you can work out pretty clearly the myriad ways in which this claim is perverse. and that's the problem.

my impatience with it has much to do with stuff i do in 3-d, so my apologies if i play a little rough.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite