Bush asked for $86 billion for the war. Our deficit is $500 billion. Do the math.
The beast of crap coding strikes again. The quote was from Bricker.
Note: rjung’s quote here was in response to this quote by Bricker:
Bricker, I have a question for you, one which may be redundant, and if I’ve missed your previous response, I apologize. My question is: Now that you have the information rjung provided, how does that effect your opinion and/or support of Bush? Thanks.
I think you’re being simplistic. It is not a worker works/capitalistic takes all the money scenario at all.
Sometimes the worker works, the capitalistic can’t find a market for the worker’s product so he takes a loss, the worker gets paid, and the capitalist goes belly-up.
Sometimes the capitalist creates a market for the worker’s work.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. It is very difficult to be a successful capitalist. Fools and money, you know?
Really? Have you ever, say, owned a bar? Do you truly think you can just hand it off to a manager and go play golf?
Just for fun, let me accept your proposition even though it’s a ridiculous one. Mr. Smith arbitrarily hires a manager to look after his affairs, and does nothing but rake in the dough.
Mr. Smith has done something of value. Mr. Smith has hired talent, and put the means into the hands of those with ability.
This is also an exceedingly difficult thing to do. Because of his activities, people are employed and productivity is increased. The market is bigger for his contribution. He has added value.
As an investment professional, I’m familiar with the scenario. It doesn’t appear you are. You dodged Bricker’s rebuttal concerning collective arrangements, and are attempting to revisit the corporation again. You and a thousand people like you pool your money together. A manager evaluates all sorts of potential investments and gives money to the one’s he thinks have the most merit. In return he gets a percentage of ownershipt. This is the money that allows business startups to “buy equi[tment, and rent space,” and employ workers. Doing that also has value.
Neither I nor Bricker have called taxes in general theft, so this appears to be a strawman of your own construction.
In actuality some unfair profits might be construed reasonably as theft, as well might some unfair taxes. You appear to be excluding the middle.
I don’t think I’m the one excluding the middle (clears throat and points). Bricker clearly equates taxation with theft twice in this thread. I will grant you that when he refers to the estate tax, he seems to indicate that a little theft would be acceptable to him, but he still calls it theft.
I put this rhetoric in the same class as Bush’s favorite talking point when it comes to taxes: The money belongs to the taxpayers, so the government should stop taking it. That has a certain simplistic schoolyard appeal to it (It’s mine, gimme!), which unfortunately is all the electorate seems to demand these days. Using this reasoning in other contexts yields silly results - perhaps we should charge rent by the footstep for people who tread on public sidewalks, which, after all, belong to the government. It’s a good indication that the reasoning is bogus.
Actually Bricker says he is not opposed to some form of estate tax, but he is opposed to theft by the state. Rather than equating the estate tax with theft, he is making a distinction between a reasonable estate tax and a confiscatory one.
Not really. The sidewalks belong to the people, not the government. The government belongs to the people.
This is your basic misconception, or so it appears to me. The people do not serve the government. The people do not owe anything to the government. The government exists to serve the people.
Seems perfectly fair to me. Without his capital, I would have no way of working at all.
Maybe you have a barely suppressed tendency towards arson to compensate for your economic inability. I do not.
Ah, yes. False Dilemma.
[QUOTE=erislover]
Yes, I used ‘theft’ as hyperbole. I certainly acknowlege that legally speaking, taxes are not theft.
Based solely on that link, I’m very disappointed. But you’ll forgive me if I withhold final judgement until I do some verification of other sources.
To continue this theme…
The government owns zip. No forestlands. No parks. No buildings. No nukes. Not even a pencil. But we the people pay some people to manage our collective properties. In fact, we pay them well; almost twice as much per annum as we are paid ourselves. Except for the military, we don’t pay them very much.
The people who are overpaid by the people soon forget that they are people too. Besides, they find it demeaning to be servants so they become surly. We the people are lazy, we choose to overlook the fact that they are lazy and surly. We give them raises. This makes them think that they are smarter than we the people, so they become Democrats.
And Democrats believe in wealth distribution. Our wealth, their distribution.
Thank you.
Well, no. We don’t give them raises (if you’re talking about our elected representatives). They give themselves raises. Now, we were most certainly stupid to allow them this power, but I’m pretty sure the average voter, given a direct vote as to whether or not to raise the salaries of public servants, would vote “no”.
And if you can show me the Congressional Record where all the Democrats voted for a pay raise and all the virtuous Republicans nobly voted to sacrifice theirs for the Common Good, I’ll eat it with ketchup.
Capitalizing is the act of protecting untranslated wealth. The mere use of untranslated wealth; not breaking it down into its parts and analyzing it, translating it, but using it as a whole thing is the process of capitalism that acts to protect that wealths inability to be translated.
Capitalism at its root is a religion.
The religion part isn’t about accessing wealth, it’s about you thinking that just because you have access to it, that you should use it. You don’t just ask, you take – and you require undefined terms in order to shelter your mind from the fact that others have access to it who refuse to take it. This is not a matter of them not wanting to use it, it is a matter of them knowing that its self refuting to accept untranslated wealth. This is where the undefined terms come into the picture that makes capitalism a religion – because when push comes to shove, there is no sound reason for protecting untranslated wealth, for accepting it, for using it.
The mere act of using something of uncertainty (unable to be translated to all beings who could desire it) is the act of protecting the very uncertainty that humans attempt to battle with respect to their intent, that respectively defines them as beings aware of their own existence. When you use money to buy an item that another person cannot afford, regardless of whether they want it or not, you are required to use an undefined term or concept to DO THIS.
That is the ideological aspect of capitalism that transcends any possible apologetics. You simply don’t have to accept the wealth just because you have access to it. The mere act of accepting wealth that you have access to, that others do not have access to - to use this pocket of uncertainty to GAIN in life, secures for certain that all you are gaining is uncertainty with regards to the very intent you presumably believe you have – a person is literally, through the very action of accepting untranslated wealth, securing with certainty their own demise such that it circumvents their own intent. This is not what beings who are aware that they exist, do.
Also learn to discern the difference between a being who states anti-capitalistic veiws to aquire untranslated wealth for themselves to use from a being who will not use it. Capitalists, which compose the vast majority of the cognitions on this earth are completely interchangable regardless of what they say. Once they have the opportunity, they will not secure the inability to use uncertainty for profit, they will act just the same as you – which makes you think that you shouldn’t have listened to them. MOST people are capitalists on this earth. MOST people will exchange a smile today for infinite smiles in the future. If you recieve a smile from one person who doesn’t smile at some others, and you accept this as a sign of wealth, you are a capitalist – your entire mind is fundamentally not aware of its own existence – it is programmed to use linguistic tokens to protect untranslated wealth, to accept it as the goal of being, as evidence of life, as evidence of success. To a capitalist, the mere presence of social stratification is proof to them of success, that they are valuable in some way. The mere presense of social stratification however is proof that the capitalist hasn’t exerted much effort in attempting to prove the inherent value of what they believe their reasons for accepting their wealth is. If you want to see how much you “deserve” your wealth, try signing it over to others and see if they give it back to you; try dumping it on a lava gusher in the ocean and see if it returns to you in kind; try giving it away to see if it’s even possible.
Capitalists are lazy, and in turn they call those who refuse to use untranslated wealth lazy. Positive reenforcement alone ranks the use of untramnslated wealth as a complete lack of intentional work. The only work on this earth of any importance to a being capable of abstracting that they exist, an intentional being is the work of translating wealth. This is not only work that most people avoid on this earth, most people on this earth deriv their sole purpose of existence from the act of attacking the attempt to translate wealth. They use circular reasoning to justify their secrets, or secret societies, their patents, their exclusive access, their value. The aquisition of untranslated wealth is not difficult as was suggested here; individuals as such are not pillars of what human intelligence constitutes - in compare, they are a null set. It’s like trying to compare the 3rd dimension to the 2nd, as being of the same kind. These types of minds are not of the same kind - even though they share fundamental constituent parts; these parts are not accessed the same.
Oh? Is that some subtle Kerry plug? 
Strangely enough, his Kennedyesque connection to the Heinz family did cross my mind there… 
Yumpin Yiminy! I was gonna hijack the thread by talking about Saddam’s support for terrorism, but instead we get this dust-up about taxes and economic ideology. Briker, et al, can you wrap your mind around the idea of a stable, optimal tax rate, or do taxes always have to be in free fall even if we have to invent numbers between one and zero? There have been repeated tax cuts from successive Republican administrations and yet the bitching goes on. What pisses me off is that, as a middle income, single, childless person, I don’t get a tax cut to speak of because it’s all going to conservative cronies. Now there’s some talk among Democratic candiates about “rolling back the Bush tax cut”, but if we leave the rates right where they are, can the bitching about taxes finally stop?
What percentage of our tax dollar goes to lazy people, anyway? If you look at a pie chart of the federal budget, you can see that old people consume the lion’s share of social spending. If we euthanize the elderly, we could have the tax cut to end all tax cuts, are you with me?
Oh, I didn’t mean to nitpick your metaphoric use of “theft” in the post. My point was rather that lawyers, by their very nature, depend wholly on the existence of a government in order to perform their labor. While it might be 100% true that no one but you did the work you got paid for, that does not really imply that we should then consider the pay you received as only a consequence of your labor. Without a government, there are no laws to cite, research, appeal to, etc, with respect to seeking specific judgments. You could have only lived the life you did inside a context of taxation. Is it this fact I am supposed to reference when I consider that the money you received in payment is yours? While I do believe that any job any American does for the pay that American receives is only possible inside of a society that has the form this one does (or similar), and so taxes are not even really metaphorically theft, the derivation in the case of the legal professions seems almost trivial.
Sheesh.
Well, the very existence of stable currency, as opposed to barter, is only realistically possible in the concept of a government, so if we adopt this method of analysis, anybody paid cash for anything is part of the cycle of taxation.
And, oddly enough, I agree. That’s very true. But there’s a hint of False Dilemma in your paragraph, as though my invoking the word theft can only be understood as either completely whimsical metaphor or gruelling accurate accusation.
I certainly accept that there are necessary and proper government functions, and that taxation is required to fund those functions. This is not theft. When the tax burden is imposed to fund unnecessary functions, some social engineering experiments, or disproportionately across the people, it begins to resemble theft, although not in a strictly legal sense, but as a comparative metaphor for the unwanted taking, by force, of that which the taker has no moral right to.
Are we clear now?
- Rick
I don’t think “unnecessary” could ever be properly qualified. WRT the thread at hand, many might say the war in Iraq was unnecessary. Or human space flight. Im not clear on what you mean by “social engineering experiments” so I’ll have to let that pass, but “disproportionately across the people” also strikes me as a bit odd. Wealthy people need and use a great number of things brought about by taxation, and while some might think that the tax burden’s “fairness” is a function of how flat it is, others might consider that services don’t scale flatly. Certainlyin manpower alonethings don’t scale. You can’t just hire 50 new workers and be done with it. For every eight to ten of them you need some kind of supervisor or manager. For every eight to ten managers, you need another manager/supervisor. People who use, and require, a larger infrastructure will require a disproportionate amount of people. Necessities do not scale, either. As someone who comes from poor beginnings, I’d think this would be clear.
At any rate, there are other ways to look at the programs you don’t like. Yo can consider that your tax dollars go only to those programs you like. I’llconider that mine goes to welfare. Happy?
I don’t follow this at all. Wealthy people use more services that are paid for by taxation then the less wealthy? Can you give me some examples?
Sure** Bricker**…uh…how about roads? Weathy people drive big cars and don’t mind paying a dollar a gallon for gasoline, so they ride about needlessly and wear out our roads. And yeah! What about skiing? At the drop of a hat the wealthy are off somewhere skiing. Riding on airplanes, useing up our air.
No?
Mmmmm…Wait! I got it! Our laws! The wealthy use the services of our laws and our government lawmakers and courts more than we do. They do this so that they can enhance and perpetuate the circumstances that first made them wealthy.
You know, like lawyers and doctors and stockbrokers and such.
I knew it was something.