You’d enjoy living in Somalia, then. Absolutely no government interference in your life there, no sir.
News flash, you fucking whiny baby: you don’t always get to have things the way you want them. I guess that idea hasn’t sunk in over the past two elections.
I call bullshit on this ridiculous claim. The lives of the middle 60% or 70% of Americans are not by any means what most western Europeans would consider “the height of luxury”. We have somewhat larger houses and more cars per family on average than middle-class western Europeans, due to our lower population density, but that’s about it. Our middle class isn’t living in any kind of material El Dorado that middle-class western Europeans can only dream about. They have cell phones and iTouches and superfast wireless just like we do.
Moreover, most western Europeans like having four to six weeks of vacation per year, and good public transportation, and reliable health insurance coverage, and good-quality nursing homes for their elderly relatives that don’t drain all their assets, and substantial unemployment benefits, and fully-funded university education. They do not consider our lack of such amenities to be “luxurious”.
Bullshit. There is absolutely nothing unfair about passing one’s estate to one’s heirs. It is only people who are of a confiscatory and redistributive turn of mind who think there is.
The nation’s economy is not a pie from which everyone deserves an equal slice, regardless of how much liberalism, in it’s continual effort to pound a square peg into a round hole, would like to make it so. There are reasons why communism has found it necessary to murder hundreds of millions of its citizens, and that is because people resent having their property and the results of their produce taken by force and given to people who didn’t earn it. ‘Fairness’ is a fiction. It does not exist. What you propose isn’t fair, it’s a different king of unfairness; one which isn’t fair, isn’t just, and it isn’t logical. It’s the result of ivory-tower rabble-rousing by university-educated malcontents on behalf of the country’s have-nots who have managed, over the decades and with a complicit coterie of Democrat politicians, to convince a sizable portion of the nation’s populace that they are getting taken advantage of by the rich and have no way of getting their ‘fair share’ of the pie, when no ‘pie’ exists to begin with.
The fact remains that no one of wealth is keeping anyone down. Everyone has the ability to get ahead if they’re willing to work hard enough to make it happen.
You said I was promoting the lie, which come to think of it, means you were wrong two ways: One, that I believed the lie; and two, that I was deliberately promoting it.
So I guess there are two retractions/apologies due.
BWAHAHAHAHA!
You? Calling me a whiny baby?
It is to laugh!
Hey, the Tooth Fairy called and says that Santa Claus wants to know if you would be interested in buying a bridge from Ward Cleaver?
Understanding Mobility in America– word highlighted for those who like to speak out their kazoos.
– bolding mine. Lesson continues at source.
And here’s a cute little graph if reading is not your thing:
Understanding Mobility in America
Welcome to the real world. In it, I can safely say that this statement is complete and utter horseshit – that it’s privately owned horseshit does not make it any more true:
– bolding mine.
I’m sure that most people in the world would love it if they never had to work a day in their lives and could have their every wish granted by the government.
But that doesn’t make it logical and it doesn’t make it right.
Sooner or later these governments’ obligations will outstrip their ability to provide them, and, having engendered a lazy and entitled populace, will have little chance of working their way back out again.
Countries simply cannot tax and spend themselves into prosperity. That’s all there is to it. And then when you combine that with politicians promising more and more benefits in order to get themselves elected, a breaking point is eventually reached, and when that happens they’ll go down the drain just like those two hotbeds of American liberalism New York and California are doing on a smaller scale now.
RedFury Income inequality is measured against the highest heights of wealth though. The problem with that is that the rich have been becoming astronomically richer. The question is whether or not that even matters. Are basic goods becoming out of reach? I tend to think not because even poor families have TVs and Computers in many cases. Yes the wealth disparity is increasing in insane ways, but at the same time goods are affordable. Who cares if someone else can buy 1 billion DVD players? I only want one.
Not going to get it then. I didn’t say you believed it, I didn’t say you were promoting it. If I had, I think a forum mod would have taken the beat stick to me. I’m not known for being subtle. I was making a “value judgement” about the right wing noise machine. Is that better?
If you really want to take it as some sort of personal attack, be my guest. have a blast.
I see a lot of sound and fury here, but nothing really what I would call a proof, primarily because “It’s not fair and it won’t work because I say it’s not fair and won’t work” isn’t a rule of inference in my system of logic.
From the Buffalo Beast’s 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2008:
Then you believe in very heavy estate taxes for the extremely wealthy then? Because someone inheriting $30 million from their father hardly has anything to do with ability after all.
First and foremost, because resource is ultimately limited. This is a given, the only argument is about how limited, not whether or no. Luxury items produced to pamper the rich falls under the category of loud, shiny crap: it benefits too few for the resources expended. Once resources are expended to produce loud, shiny crap, it remains forever loud shiny crap, save for that fraction which can be recycled. I’m sure the rich can be rendered down, but a poor substitute for whale oil and unacceptable as shortening for pastry.
So it’s finally come to this, has it? The very idea that people should work to get ahead is antiquated nonsense on a par with the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus!
No wonder Rush Limbaugh is so cranked up about you people.
Except for the wiretaps, you mean…and arbitrary searches, and indefinite arrest and imprisonment without charges or trials, and restrictions on what you can smoke, who you can marry and what decisions you can make about your own reproduction system…oh, and whether your kids have a right to learn science in science classes…aside from all that, you guys don’t want the government anywhere near you.
“Cranked up”? Limbaugh on speed. Can’t imagine. Won’t imagine, refuse to imagine…
Like in the case of their health care, I have been waiting for more that 30 years for this prophecy to become a reality. It is more likely that adjustments will be done, but as I remember from past discussions I always find that one can count with the hand fingers the number of articles or important people in Europe that demand that they should consider the American solutions.
Not sure about New York, but California is saddled with insane rules and laws that conservatives adore (and can only be overturned with super majorities) that typically underfund the local government, even in good times.
This is why production, and a populace willing to engage in it, is important. When you are creating and/or producing things, you are creating wealth. When you are using things up (i.e., taxing and spending) you are depleting wealth and slowing or eventually stopping its creation. That is when resources get used up and things go down the drain.
It’s a myth that working will automatically get you ahead, that everyone who is rich has necessarily worked for it, or that everyone even has an opportunity to work.
There is not necessarily any correlation between work and wealth. The very richest people seldom lift a finger to do any real labor. Those who do the most backbreaking labor (like all those illegal aliens, for instance) have the least wealth.