mcgeedo

I see many posts (on a more Conservative forum) complaining about the redistribution of wealth to the welfare class, but this is an interesting commentary on the Liberal tax plan at the $250,000 threshold. This was originally posted in response to Obama's "share the wealth" comment over the weekend.

I'd be interested to hear Liberal responses to this aspect. My own point of view is that you reap what you sow, and don't ask me for part of my share to make up for your lack of ambition. This is closely related to my belief in equal opportunity, not guarantees of equal outcome.

Quote:

Butt Scratching and Bass Fishing
by Dave Ramsey

A couple of weeks ago, I worked late like I sometimes need to do to run my business. It was a nice Tennessee summer evening, and I was enjoying the drive home. About 7:30, as I pulled to a stop light a few blocks from my office, I noticed a light on in the corner office of a friend’s office building. Through the twilight I could make out my friend’s silhouette as he bent over his desk. Being a fellow entrepreneur, I knew what he was doing. He was pouring over some receivables. Some turkey hadn’t paid him, and he was trying to make his accounts balance so he would have the cash to make it another day. In that instant, I had a flashback to some of the ridiculous statements I’ve been hearing on the talking-head news channels and from some individuals during this political year. And I’ll be honest—I instantly felt the heat of anger flow
through my body.

Let me tell you why. You see, my friend who I saw working late—we’ll call him Henry—is a great guy.
He’s what you want your son to grow up to be. He loves God, his country, his wife, and his kids. He didn’t have the academic advantage of attending a big-name university. Instead, he started installing heating and air systems as a grunt laborer after he graduated from high school. He was and is a very hard and
diligent worker, and before long, the boss taught him the trade. But when he was 24, after 6 years of service, the company he was working for got into financial trouble and laid him off.
Henry still had his tools, so he bought an old pickup to haul around his materials and tools, and suddenly he was in business. He knew about heating and air-conditioning, but not about business, so he made a lot of mistakes.

He persisted. He took accounting and management at the community college to learn about business.
He started reading books on business, HVAC, marriage, kids, God, and anything else someone he
respected recommended. Today he is one of the best-read men I know. Soon, because of his fabulous service and fair prices, he developed a great reputation, and his little business began to grow. Henry started 15 years ago, and now he has 17 employees whose families are fed because he does a great job. He is in church on Sunday and seldom misses his kids’ Little League games. Sometimes he has to miss a game because some poor soul has their AC go out in the 96-degree Tennessee summer heat, but Henry makes sure they are served. He is, by all standards, a good man. He is, by all standards, what makes America great.
Henry and I are friends, and so he asked me some financial questions last year. I learned in the process that his personal taxable income last year was $328,000. I smiled with pride for this 70-hour a week guy because he is living the dream.
At the stop light that evening, I also thought of another guy I know—and that is where the anger flash came from. We will call him John. While John does not have the same drive Henry has, I can say that he, too, is a good man.
John also graduated from high school and did not attend a big-name university. He went to work at a local factory 15 years ago. When 5:00pm comes around, John has probably already made it to his car in the parking lot. He comes in 5 minutes late, takes frequent breaks, and leaves 5 minutes early. However, to his credit, he is steady and works hard.

Over the years, due to his steadiness and seniority, he has worked his way up to about $75,000 per year in that same factory. He seldom misses his kid’s ballgames, but most nights you will find him in front of the TV where he has become an expert on “American Idol,” “The Biggest Loser,” and who got thrown off the island. When he is not in front of the TV, he spends a LOT of time and money bass fishing on our local lake. He never works over 40 hours a week and hasn’t read a non-fiction book since high school.

This is America, and there is nothing wrong with either set of choices. Nothing wrong, that is, until the politicians and socialists get involved.
I have seen several elitist people on the talking-head channels make the statement lately that people making over $250,000 per year have a “moral imperative” to pay more in taxes to take care of the country’s problems. This is not only infuriating—it is economically, spiritually, and morally crazy!

Where in the world do these twits get off saying that Henry should be punished for his diligence? If you are John, where do you get off trying to take Henry’s hard-earned money away from him in the name of your misguided “fairness”? If you want to sit on the lake, drink beer, scratch your butt, and bass fish, that is perfectly fine with me. I am not against any of those activities and have engaged in some of them myself at one time or another. But you HAVE NO RIGHT to talk about “moral imperatives” about what other people have earned due to their diligence. That money is not yours! You want some money? Go earn some! Get up, leave the cave, kill something, and drag it home.

We are in a dangerous place in our country today. A segment of our population has decided that it is the government’s job to provide all of their protection, provision, and prosperity. This segment has figured out that government doesn’t have the money to give them everything they want, so somebody else has to pay for it. That is how the “politics of envy” was born. “Tax the rich” has become the mantra of the left, and this political season it has been falsely dubbed a “moral imperative.”

Ninety percent of America’s millionaires are first-generation rich. They are Henry. To tax them because you think it is a “moral imperative” is legalizing governmental theft from our brightest, most charitable, and most productive citizens. If I can get a law passed that says you must surrender all your cars to the government because it is the “moral imperative” of anyone who owns cars to support the latest governmental program, that would be a violation of private property rights and simply morally wrong. This new “moral imperative” to redistribute wealth is no different from that. It’s the SAME THING!

Please, America, re-think the politics of envy! You are sowing the seeds of our destruction when you punish the Henrys of our culture. If you think taxing the populace to support government programs is the best way—and I don’t—then at
least tax every single person the same! There are very few Henrys out here who would squawk much
about paying a set percentage of their income—if everyone else did, too. But this idea of some buttscratching bass fisherman saying government should tax his neighbor and not him—just because his neighbor has succeeded—must stop.

So the next time an elitist media talking-head starts telling you it is the moral imperative of our culture to tax my friend Henry, change the channel. The next time you see someone wealthy who feels guilty and is preaching the politics of envy, change the channel. The next time you see some celebrity who feels guilt over their income preaching socialism, change the channel.

And the next time you run into a misguided, butt-scratching bass fisherman who says the evil rich people in our culture should have their private property confiscated because that is fair… well just shake your head walk away—and make sure to vote against his candidate. If he and his type win, God help America.

Baraka_Guru

This is an interesting topic, but I'm uncertain about how you've framed it.

Here you have a op-ed piece with anecdotal support, and a misguiding perspective.

It assumes that those in the welfare class inherently have a "lack of ambition." It assumes that those on welfare landed there because they don't want to work, and perhaps it also means that they don't "[love] God, [their] country, [their spouses], and [their] kids."

If you are going to critique a class of people, you should at least present a stronger case. Do you know the demographics of the welfare class? Do you know why people end up there? Do you know how long they stay there?

My own view? I think the wealthy have a social responsibility to help provide for those in need. Within capitalism, not everyone can be rich. There are causalities of wealth, and it can be brutal. And the conservative view would keep it that way.

I'm not for that.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Jozrael

There's got to be a middle ground.

Derwood

"I earned every penny of my fortune and fuck anyone who wants me to help someone with less" is a pretty poor foundation for a civilized society

Jozrael

That doesn't invalidate the point the article makes, though :\.

roachboy

like baraka guru said, this is an interesting topic, but the framing in this particular thread is so screwy that it kinda sucks the life out of it--even at the level of the title--which makes a distinction between the redistribution of wealth and a moral imperative---we'd have to fight through a thicket of assumptions which only begin to make sense in the inverted world of conservative ideology.

at this point, i see no reason to take that ideology seriously except as a sociological question--why do these curious arguments appeal to a particular limited social group?

it follows then that if you want a discussion, mcgeedo, it's incumbent on you to do a little work to make it happen.
step one is to translate your premises out of the cloud of rightwing gobble-de-gook that they currently framed in, and pose on that basis questions that are worth the trouble of addressing.

__________________
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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ratbastid

I'm not going to respond directly to that lovely narrative of an op-ed, as it's basically a single anecdotal, emotional data point and can't be sensibly used to draw policy conclusions from.

My assessment of the wealth disparity in this country is that it's rarely a matter of ambition or hard work, outside the conservative world-fantasy. Some of the poorest people I know work multiple jobs to make ends meet. I know immigrants (yes, some of them illegal) who work harder than you or I can probably imagine.

The issue isn't laziness, it's opportunity. Most of the wealth in this country (and by most, I don't mean 51%) is concentrated at the very tippy top. Lots of people think of themselves as privileged, doing well, upper class, but the fact is, compared to the holders of like 90% of the wealth in this country, they're paupers. One of the real problems with middle-class conservatives is, they think they're the rich ones who conservative policies will take care of, when they're really the poor ones that conservative policies will screw. It's a massive con-job perpetrated from the top socio-economic strata.

With the vast wealth imbalance, certain people from certain classes can be, say, President of the United States of America, and it doesn't take smarts or a background of success or raw talent. It takes a daddy who did that. Whereas my friend Jerman, whose parents are from Venezuela, couldn't ever rise to that level no matter how skilled and brilliant he is (and he IS). Part of that is racial, but the much bigger part (as Obama is currently demonstrating) is socio-economic. I'm not convinced the two can be separated as American culture is currently constituted.

The failure of trickle-down economics should be obvious. How the wealthy GOT wealthy in the first place was by NOT letting their wealth trickle down. And when I say wealthy, I'm talking about the top 5%. And (with some anecdotal exceptions, I'm sure) most of that is legacy wealth. Money that's been around for multiple generations, growing in banks and in the market, without any particular effort or ambition on the part of its owners. Paris Hilton is vastly more typical than Bill Gates.

So, these perambulations aside: I'm not sure we have a moral imperative to redistribute the wealth per se. I'm not real interested in that. I'm REAL interested in making sure people are taken care of and have everything they need. And if money to make that happen has to come from the cash that somebody was going to spend on their eighth house, I'm not going to cry too hard about it.

My question for you, mcgeedo, is: do you believe that "equal opportunity", as you claim to believe in, currently exists? If not, what do you think ought to be done about that?

Amaras

An additional distinction I'd like to make is the difference between those rich who engage in "value-added" activities,
like the gentlemen in the article who employs others, provides a material service, and speculators.
I think a lot of the dislike of the rich occurs when speculation gets out hand, the market overheats and melts
down (like now), and everyone suffers.
No, I'm not suggesting we eliminate the markets as they exist now. It's just that implicitly I, for one, do not
respect Wall Street millionaires. I do respect those who build brick and mortar businesses.

__________________
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-Noam Chomsky
Love is a verb, not a noun.
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The function of genius is to furnish cretins with ideas twenty years later.
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smooth

there's so much wrapped up in that article, it's hard to bite off a piece and start to chew on it.

the argument, at least as far as I can tell, is that someone has to pay taxes and a line has to be drawn somewhere.
I can't remember exactly, but I suspect that 250,000 is some kind of quintile or must be linked to some kind of study...unless it's just a number pulled out of a hat but Obama doesn't strike me as the type to advance that kind of hokey-pokey.

Yeah, I understand some small businesses will feel a bit crunched by extra taxes, but according to the plan it merely rolls the rates back to Reagan era rates which plenty of people were satisfied and even prospered under. It's even better in the sense that if that money is put toward health care for all workers than it reduces costs for many, allows others to be competitive with large companies that can offer health benefits, and reduces problems associated with sick workers including improving productivity.

the moral imperative as I understood it was that paying taxes is patriotic and it's morally correct to pay one's fair share to participate in the pie of US commerce. This argument is promoted as opposed to getting a free ride or using dodgy tax shelters, I never saw anyone argue how the pie should be sliced as a moral mandate.

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"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

Jinn

The only way that I've ever seen the conservative mind-set where it's "redistribution of wealth" and not "helping the needy" is when the person can thoroughly convince themselves that the poor deserve their situation, either through apathy, laziness, or poor choices.

If you find it possible (despite the cognitive dissonance) that people are genuinely poor out of circumstance - fatherless home, poorly educated parents, poor schools, crime-ridden neighborhood, poor job markets, abusive relationships, then this conservative ideology necessarily falls apart.

When you believe that "it's 2008! The world should be color blind! And sexism does not exist! Women have broken the glass ceiling!", the mindset works. When you honestly believe that everyone has the same 'opportunity' as you, and the ONLY reason you're as successful as you are is because of your ingenuity or your drive, then you're ignoring the privilege you had as a child. There are plenty of people with ingenuity and drive who will never even reach the starting salary of a more privileged person. No matter how many times a conservative harps on the point that everyone can 'pull themselves up by their boostraps', it doesn't make it any more true. And as Obama said so nicely, you can't pull yourself up by your bootstraps if you DON'T HAVE BOOTS.

I hardly think that a few percentage point change for those making over $250,000 will unfairly burden them, particularly when considering the potential benefits. Wealth disparity is a GENERATIONAL thing, and it takes a long time to repair. If your parents are poor, and can't afford to give you a stable home in a good neighborhood with good schools, your chances of providing those for YOUR children diminish. That's not to say it's impossible, but the 'potential', the 'opportunity', isn't the same.

The really damning part of this op-ed is that someone thinks that a minor increase in the taxes of those making $250,000 or more is socialism, communism, or wealth distribution.

And finally; "He’s what you want your son to grow up to be. He loves God, his country, his wife, and his kids." Sorry, that is not what I want my son to grow up to be. Thanks, though, Dave Ramsey. Your characterizations of the 'talking heads' is bemusing, made particularly so by the fact that you too are a talking head.

__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

Tusko

i agree entirely that any kind of redistribution of funds is wrong. forced charity has become a pervasive and evil part of modern society.

however, if there ARE going to be various robbery taxes, i don't think a flat tax is where it should be.

a very good libertarian friend of mine helped me with this.

if you're poor, you can't pay.
applying the same tax throughout means that it must be low enough for the lowest income bracket to pay.
one can, in effect, slide it up along the spectrum- and still ensure everyone pays.

mcgeedo

One of the most interesting comments to my original post is that a tax increase of "just a few percentage points" on the more productive members of our society isn't Socialism. So, is there a magic number? Is a 5.9 percent increase just "helping those in need," while 6 percent is rampant wealth redistribution? Isn't there a principle involved, rather than a threshold?

"If you are going to critique a class of people, you should at least present a stronger case." Why? Do you seriously think that a few well turned phrases will convert the various Liberals on this forum from the error of their ways? My intent is to incite a lively discussion and get a variety of opinions. In spite of what you might think, I enjoy hearing the opinions of others and I occassionally learn something, even from Liberals.

Stare At The Sun

Actually, its the best foundation.

Capitalism rewards productive achievement.

Socialism rewards sitting on your hands.

How can society function when those who produce the least(help society the most), earn just as much as those who work?

If you don't pull your social weight, get fucked.

Jinn

There is not a number. Increasing a tax rate in a democratic republic run largely by regulated capitalism has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with socialism. It's simple red-baiting.

And sorry, I refuse to participate further in a thread which so reeks of arrogance. Learning, "even if from liberals" and "teach us the error of our ways", indeed.

__________________
"I'm typing on a computer of science, which is being sent by science wires to a little science server where you can access it. I'm not typing on a computer of philosophy or religion or whatever other thing you think can be used to understand the universe because they're a poor substitute in the role of understanding the universe which exists independent from ourselves." - Willravel

filtherton

It is interesting to note that proponents of free market capitalism are also proponents of wealth redistribution as moral imperative; they just prefer the market instead of the government as the main conduit of redistribution.

In any case, wealth redistribution to me isn't a matter of morals (at least not primarily), but a matter of social stability. Obviously, it would be great if everyone could be a prototypical Horatio Alger. But that's impossible. Sometimes, the cost of doing business is making sure that the people you got over on have enough so that they don't feel compelled to take your shit directly. If you think you feel bad looking at the taxes taken out of your paycheck, imagine how positively down you'd feel if the mass of poor folks in this country actually revolted.

There is much more to picking one's self up by one's bootstraps (besides an ironic violation of the laws of physics). Luck is just as important as effort when fate decides who is going to be rich and who isn't. Hard work can only get you so far. I think that people who subscribe to the idea of the noble bootstrapper are caught up in some sort of self serving fantasy about a just market. The market isn't just. Wealth redistribution at its best attempts to correct for market shortcomings.

roachboy

well, first of all i have no faith at all that any conservative actually knows what socialism is. generally, it is an empty category around which various nitwit projections get clustered. the defining features of socialism--democratic socialism anyway--have nothing to do with tax rates, particularly not taken in isolation. so there's nothing interesting about the question of whether there is some magic number or not---except that you don't really have an idea of what you're talking about.

one of the main features of a democratic socialist system is a political orientation toward full employment.
how anyone gets from that to any of these conservative cliche's about "sitting on your hands" is beyond me--except if you factor in not knowing what the fuck you're talking about--in which case anything's possible.
wealth redistribution is generally oriented by this sort of system-level or macro-policy goal. in that contexts, it's really just a transfer of wealth from one place to another--nothing moral about it---a political consensus is what matters.
the discourse of morality is another conservative non-sequitor.

generally the rationale is that the ability of a firm to extract profit is a function of system maintenance---which means the economy cannot be understood as floating in a separate space, but rather as part of the broader society. so firms (and individuals who benefit from their activity) owe it back to the system to contribute towards its maintenance.

there's more to this, but i'll stop
it's pretty simple.
and it makes a hell of a lot more sense than neoliberal assumptions do.

whether you *like* taxes or not is irrelevant.
the "effects" on the "welfare class" is in another matter, another conservative fever dream.
it is a mystery to me why people choose to believe it---easier to blame the excluded in a class society than to think about why the social class system is as it is. this is another area in which neoliberalism is worth nothing at all.

__________________
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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

So wait a minute...are you saying that the liberal viewpoint on this issue is erroneous? But I thought you wanted a lively discussion? A discussion of what? How "wrong" liberals are about a conservative view of taxation?

I would comment more, offering a well-thought-out opinion except I don't see a way of doing so constructively based on the OP. If anything, I would rather critique the piece you've provided as support material, but I don't think that was your intent. Actually, I'm still uncertain of your intent. Do you want us to discuss, in a more general sense, the distribution of wealth within the context of governmental morality? If this is the case, maybe I'll think about it some and provide my own backgrounder. As it is, I can't discuss it based on this op-ed piece you've posted. It's not conducive to an open discussion on the matter. There are many problems with the piece, even internally.

If, however, your intent is to have us discuss this from the viewpoint of the op-ed piece, then we have a different discussion altogether.

What is it you want?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Tusko

i agree with this.

look at me, and 100000 of my peer group.

priveleged, subruban folk.

never had to work in high school.

don't need to worry about paying tuition.

don't need to worry about healthcare costs.

nice and insulated.

Stare At The Sun

Ah ignorance.

I'm not privileged.

I worked throughout HS.
I'm very much in debt for my student loans.
Went for over a year without health insurance despite having asthma.

I simply understand that capitalism is the only moral form of economics.

It rewards those who help society, by helping themselves.

And that's how it should be.

Baraka_Guru

I just wanted to point out how important this is to the thread so far.

Democratic socialism also seeks fair work practices, including the support for fair wages and responsible workplaces.

To think that socialism encourages laziness is as fallacious as assuming that the logical conclusion of conservatism is fascism.

To think that socialism doesn't or cannot exist within capitalism is as fallacious as assuming that conservatism is inherently capitalistic. (Both socialists and conservatives were critics of capitalism in the 19th century.)

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

ratbastid

Leaving the meta-discussion aside for a moment:

mcgeedo, I'd like you to respond to the question I asked at the bottom of my post above. Do you or don't you believe that the current state of the world (or, country, I suppose) provides equal opportunity for all? If not, what would you propose to do to address that?

I actually agree with you entirely--if everyone really honestly were given equal opportunities to make of them what they will, we'd have a very workable society; the bright, eager, hard workers would rise to the top, and the loafers would sweep their floors, and few could argue that things aren't tidily as they should be. Obviously that "if" implies I don't think that's how it is right now.

Derwood

that's nice in your hypothetical socialism construct where all wealth is distributed evenly. but no one is proposing such a thing, so why use it as your example?

mcgeedo

Excellent question, rat. No, I don't think that there is equal opportunity for all right now in this country. I think that that should be our goal, for moral reasons. And surprisingly enough, I think that there are those who need help directly, in addition to opportunity. These include children of those who don't take advantage of the opportunity provided.

So, how to go about achieving that goal? There are a lot of things, like improving the educational system, motivating kids to stay in school, job training, child care and so on. There are a million programs to improve opportunity for those who want to take advantage of it.

But the key is to reward effort, not failure. One only has to look at the USSR of old to see what a dismal failure it is to give no incentive to hard work.

And regarding the "arrogance" comment, that gave me a smile :-) If you could read the Liberal posts with my eyes :-)

Baraka_Guru

What's interesting is that these, for the most part, are featured prominently on the social democratic platform of Canada's NDP party.

So you support these socialist initiatives? (Mind you, some of these are more socialist than others, depending on the approach.) Or do you mean to have these things privatized and paid for completely out of the users' pockets? (As opposed to their being fully or partially funded by the government.)

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

ratbastid

Well, I agree with you entirely this far. Problem is, all these actions--noble actions, actions we should be taking--produce results a generation off or longer, and so are never going to appeal to a community that's up for re-election every few years. I think there's got to be something that can be done now to address what's going on now.

And here's where we part company. The failure of the USSR was political and social, not economic per se. Not that the Soviet economy was anything to shout about, at the end, but it was a side-effect, not a root cause. This is the same basic system that beat us into space, remember. Nothing changed about the system after that, just the people working it.

I'm sure.

Mojo_PeiPei

I think it is safe to say at least in my eyes, which would be a more conservative view point, is, it is not enough to merely to make this system of equal opportunity a reality.

The people have to want if for themselves, and I know that will piss many of you off, as you'll no doubt assume I'm saying that all of them "don't want it for themselves", that is really not the case.

I work in a liquor store, not necessarily what would be the hood, but as Minnesota is mostly wonder bread it is a more "colorful" part of town. Bottom line is I have to interact with the dregs of society on a daily basis. It infuriates me when I see these many homeless or those at the bottom of the economic ladder coming into the store with their Barry Obomba pins and t-shirts, trying to use their food stamp/EBT cards to buy liquor. When your Black Messiah is elected President, they think the US is going to do a complete 180, and they'll be on top because there is a "black" president.

And that is my point for these types of people, there is no incentive to work harder, they don't do it now, and they think they're getting the key to the candy store when Barack takes over with his policies. I'm not so stupid to broadly use these clowns as an example, being that my area of study doesn't use a great many sociological words, I hope I am correct in saying is I'm sure these people only serve as a microcosm of the populace.

I hope you guys don't throw this out as a threadjack, I spoke of Barack in here as it is his policies that speak of this redistribution, and these assholes are the ones that it will affect. I guess it will affect me too, as the store doesn't pay me a great amount of money I get pissed when I see that roughly 20-25% of my check gets ripped from me every two weeks, but who knows, maybe Barack will ease that burden on me, and maybe that's the point of all of this.

__________________
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aceventura3

On the general question of morality and re-distribution of wealth, I look at it this way. It is not immoral to be wealthy. It is immoral to steal. Taking a persons wealth to keep or to give to someone else is stealing. People do not volunteer to be taxed for the purpose of re-distribution, it happens under the threat of the loss of freedom (jail time) or at gun point (confiscation of property by authorities). People will volunteer to pay taxes for schools/training, short-term welfare needs and other measures to help people succeed. I have a very libertarian view on this issue and I don't think it is complicated.

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roachboy

well, ace, i would counter that with a simple claim: your ability to have wealth is contingent on a broader social system which enabled you to acquire the dispositions and background required to get to that place, and your ability to enjoy that wealth is contingent on a minimal level of social stability and so you woe much to that system and what manages to keep it operational. so if there's a stealing involved, it'd follow from your relation to the redistribution of wealth.

=================================

other things that a democratic socialist system geared around full employment, for example, would offer: job retraining. high wages. relatively tightly regulated work conditions. profit sharing. shared control over the management of the workplace with employees (through proxies typically on the order of facility committees--personally, i'm in favor of a more radical form of direct-democratic control over the workplace, but that's another matter.)

to orient job retraining, for example, there'd have to be accurate and reliable information about the actual state of the system as a whole--so the entire reagan period idea that one can treat statistics as a simple extension of ideology would go out the window.

parallel points could be made about each of the features above.

because the state is involved more extensively and explicitly in the shaping of system parameters, those parameters become political. this makes them MORE responsive to democratic control. the american model of disappearing state functions behind an illusion of "free markets" is about REDUCING responsiveness to democratic pressure and LIMITING the ability of people to impact upon how the system operates.

i don't know why that's desirable.

you certainly cannot confuse sitting in front of your television watching the world happen as if everything about it is given in advance with anything remotely like democracy.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ASU2003

I have no problem if a person works hard or invents some new product and makes a lot of money. And, I think their taxes should be low. But if the son of the HVAC guy comes in and does nothing but get an MBA and manage employees from the golf course, I would think he should take a pay cut.

The problem comes when you try to tax companies. If you try and raise their taxes, they all will just raise their prices or lay off employees. That is why I support a higher tax rate on the people making above $250,000 and aren't inventors or founders. Usually in that case, they haven't setup a big company selling a needed product and are just picking salary numbers out of the air.

Now, if they started or founded the company, I have no problems (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates,...) with them having low taxes, but if they are descendants or hired replacements, I say tax them at 80% (Wal-Mart, GE, Kodak, Financial companies)

As for the poor getting hand-outs, there are some that would be ok (emergency health care), charitable donations, public works,... But others I'm not a fan of.

And I find it odd that this administration is going to leave us with a socialized banking industry. I can just imagine what the right-wing media would be saying if Gore or Kerry were the President right now.

flstf

Rewarding effort is a good goal but too often the rewards are given to those whose efforts are geared to obtaining wealth via political connections, corruption and insider information. I believe that in our current system much of the wealth is obtained this way and there are more of them than the John Galts out there in free enterprise land. It would be great if there was some way to stop wealth generation via corruption and insider status but that does not benefit many of those currently making the rules.

Baraka_Guru

The idea that taxation is theft is amusing to me. It's right up there with the idea that property is theft. Both of these ideas smack of anarchy, which means neither are sustainable.

If one doesn't like the way their taxes are being used, it does not follow that their government is committing robbery--unless they're an anarchist.

Are there any anarchists here?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

mcgeedo

"Rewarding effort is a good goal but too often the rewards are given to those whose efforts are geared to obtaining wealth via political connections..."

Some inherit money. Don't you want a say in what happens to your possessions when you die?

Some get money illegally or with undue influence. This is a separate problem, and should be handled by law enforcement.

Far more people live off the government teat. These are the ones I'm talking about. These are the people that tax-payers resent so strongly.

roachboy

maybe the overall policy orientation of american-style capitalism is entirely dysfunctional. maybe it parks people.
maybe people get parked because nitwit conceptions of what socialism is prevents the folk who steer the system from doing anything else.
maybe this collapse of the "moral" into capitalist relations is a self-fulfilling logic: folk who are excluded for structural reasons end up being blamed for the effects of structure so that structure can be disappeared, like a political dissident in the chile of the 1970s. which was also an american production.
maybe the primary obstacle to american empire is the ways of thinking that have been disseminated within the empire in order to make empire seem a fact of nature rather than a political formation.
perhaps the paranoid mode of ideological governance is a circle.

i am pleased to see the "free market" ideology, and its ultra-right variant in anarcho-conservative "libertarian" thinking being pulverized by events unfolding in the world.
nothing good comes of it, not even for the ideologues who carry shit for this way of thinking: the folk who benefit do not in the main believe, otherwise they would not benefit as they do. a world of chumps presents itself, and in a world of chumps who think themselves other than chumps, the only sane move is to take what you can get and get out. "these idiots cannot run a coherent system. they don't even see that there is one."

then i wonder: how do folk believe this stuff? where does it come from? how is it possible for example to erase the history of actually existing capitalism--which is only a coherent social system--that is the dominant mode of production at the scale we now are accumstomed to thinking about--after 1870. capitalism as a dominant mode of production has been remarkably unstable--depression in the 1870s, depression in the 1890s...world war...depression in the 1920s and into the 1930s--world war. the only period of relative stability followed world war 2, and the institutional configuration that enabled it would be seen by most libertarian types as socialist. what i don't get is the 1970s-early 80s period, during which a conservative movement took shape bent in part of dismantling what they apparently never understood. but the system of production had already outstripped them, as had the patterns of ownership--so they were perhaps in a reactive mode but at the same time understood that something Different was taking shape but had not idea what to do. they were like the egyptians in the way hegel talks about them: they "knew there was a riddle" but couldn't get distance enough on it to see it as a riddle, so they were stuck repeating it. but that cannot be right---more reasonable is to assume that the transition away from nation-states which was already underway in the 1970s posed problems that the right could not really work out, so the best move was to privatize as much as possible in order to reduce political risk in general---in the interim, they could naturalize the notion of nation---almost knowing that it was of limited functionality for a limited time--so the main thing was to reduce risk and get out.

it's always seemed to me that conservative ideology was something produced in the interests of a group which was not the group being addressed by the ideology. like there was something patronizing about it. but as it acquired traction and so acquired social power, a faction within the right that actually believed this shit rose to prominence--but it kept that patronizing quality to it, so that can't be right. more consistent would be to think that shills had been put forward. but that's a paranoid avenue to go down. it leads to conspiracy. but conspiracy isn't necessary.

but still, the sense that conservative economic ideology has this nihilist streak to it that is not at all present in what it says, but shows up when you think about what it says against the background of the history that lead up to their saying it. this is not the same as adam smith or ricardo. but i only really know about them from marx. maybe that's true for you too.

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

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

The_Dunedan

I don't know why I'm doing this, but here goes...


You first. I have yet to see you post anything which isn't some equally impenetrable form of leftwing gobble-do-gook.

A system of economic organization wherein the means of production is owned, primarily or in total, by the State or, in some understandings, any collective body. There; care to retract that snide little gem?

Except that when you tax someone's earnings, you're taxing all the time, effort, and thought he put into making that money. You are now taking ownership of one of the crucial means of production (capital) by force and transferring its' control to the State. Moreover, you are ex post facto taking possession of the time, effort, and thought which went into making that money: howzit feel to be a Slave Owner? Means of production under control of the State; Socialism.

If you -really- need an answer to that, come check out my neighborhood (such as it is.) 60+ able-bodied adults, 4 people with jobs. The rest sit on their arses and drink Nyquil all day while drawing checks because they can. Because the system allows them to do so. What you "liberals" frequently fail to realize is that some people are just plain lazy, stupid, and happy that way: they're perfectly happy to be subsidised with my money. Giving these people a job is like giving The Tragedy of Othello to a milk cow: she doesn't want it, wouldn't know what to do with it if she did, and is perfectly happy with the Status Quo.

So let me get this straight. I'm walking down the street at night and I run into three other guys. They pull guns and demand my money (3:1 majority rules seems like a political consensus). I pay them because I don't want to wake up missing my kidneys tomorrow. They leave with my money (transferring my wealth from my pockets into their own) and I go home without the paycheck I worked all week for. And you find this acceptable?! Please tell me I'm misreading your leftwing gobble-de-gook here: I haven't been a Communist in some years and I'm afraid I've lost my ear for the language.

So my whole street, all three burnt-out meth-labs, child-molester, Church-cheating welfare queens with the Dodge Ram 'n all, is an hallucination? Fascinating...

Because we can look out our windows and see it, it's kind of like trees that way.

All enforced at the point of a gun. Why is it, I wonder, that you lefties are so disinclined to acknowledge this aspect of your pipe-dreams? Every single one of those nice little ideas up there would be enforced upon others by violence or the threat of violence. Funny how "evil" Capitalism is predicated upon mutually beneficial voluntary exchange, while "good" Communism or Socialism is based on threatening to blow someone's face off.

Because the world is full of deeply, deeply stupid people who have no business trying to run a trotline, let alone an enterprise with more than two people. Stupid people vote for stupid things, and stupid things are something I do my level best to avoid. Unfortunately, stupid people voting for stupid things frequently succeed in getting them, as witness almost everything Congress has done in the past eight years.

Why in God's name would you think that was what you were seeing? This is Mercantilism or Corporatism or Fascism (take your pick) failing under its' own weight, not Capitalism. Capitalism disallows the Gov't interference and distortion of Markets which created this problem in the first place, especially the ridiculous notion of "Corporate Personhood" which allowed the monstrosity known as Corporate Welfare (AKA The Big Bad Bailout) to exist in the first place.

Again, NONE of this is Capitalism! Capitalism was destroyed in the US by the 1850s, mostly thanks to the Eerie, and was buried 12 feet deep by that treasonous scumbag Abraham Lincoln's War Department.

ratbastid

The binary nature of your thinking is regrettable.

The_Dunedan

How so? Threat of force is threat of force, and when that force is coming from the State it's coming from an entity with the means, the ability, and the inclination under the proper circumstances to blow people's faces off. Ask Viki Weaver.

ratbastid

You respond from inside the box you're in because it's the only place you have to respond from. You'd have to be outside the box to SEE the box, which would be the only way to get out of the box.

If this seems like a koan to you.... good.

Derwood

wow, fantastic. where the hell do you live? 56 out of 60 people are unemployed and milking the government.....even if this is true (which I doubt), do you really think that percentage translates across the entire welfare state? give me a break...even you don't believe this

Baraka_Guru

The_Dunedan: You espouse plutocracy? Didn't we leave most of that behind in the 20th century?

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

The_Dunedan

It might seem like a Koan, but it smells like an evasion. How is the threat to shoot someone if they don't hand over their money any different from the threat to shoot someone if they don't hand over their money?

Appalachia. Entire county has less than 9,000 people, and that's counting the illegals who work the Christmas-tree farms. A "male human" down the road is one of the 4 who work, but only because he's forced. He's the neighborhood child molester, just out of prison for impregnating his 13-year-old stepdaughter. He can't get any benefits, so he had to get a job. Most of the rest of the street pretty much just sit there, unless (as happens every five years or so) one of them burns a trailer down. Somewhat more frequently violence is involved; someone assaults someone else, or gets arrested for threatening someone and then assaults the three Deputies arresting him, for instance. The really fun one was the guy who was growing 30+ cannabis plants in his backyard, driving over them with his bush-hog as the DEA helicopter was circling over his house.

I don't care if you don't believe it; you're free to come and see for yourself. And no, I don't think this percentage translates across the entire welfare state, but I know that assholes like my neighbors exist everywhere.

Where did you get -that- idea? Plutocracy is rule by wealth, or rule by virtue of wealth. I espouse the idea that nobody has the right to rule over anybody by force, whether that force is "legitimized" by State execution, great wealth, or simple interpersonal violence.