Brian, that was a nasty thing for me to say, and I apologize for having said it.
With that, I’m going to bow out of this particular thread given that I couldn’t keep a civil tongue in my head while posting to it.
Willgolf,
A person like me can’t take offense to anything personal, only a refutation matters. I was born a natural cynic, named after that great school of thought, which is also the word “dog” in Greek, which is God spelled backards in English, of course. Cynicism is an aggressive form of optimism, which is why it is demonized. In the age of toxic information waste sites, it’s like being born with wings on your feet.
The fact that you consider the rest of us to be worshipping rich people is the beginning of a large misunderstanding here.
But the key here is that there have been logically justified reasons for redistributing wealth. The way to redistribute wealth is to take it from those who have it, or have them give it voluntarily. The latter is fine, the former has some equality problems. If we start out from the assumption that everyone is equal under the law you can clearly see we’ve breached our starting assumptions.
Because it isn’t a competition, it isn’t you vs them. It is a matter of performing high-demand services which have a profitable market value. Nothing stops you from doing the same in any number of industries. Nothing would also, then, prohibit you from redistributing your own wealth without trampling the rights of others. That this won’t happen in practice could be a matter of debate.
Like controlling where other people’s money goes?
Well, that is an individual thing. I highly doubt there is this oligarchy of hate towards the incompetent or perpetually poor. No secret clubs where they watch films of people starving in the streets and laugh while smoking cigars or something.
I say this quite a bit: without an economically polarized society there can not be large profit or rapid growth because there is little incentive to do so. Harder work will benefit the worker not at all. While businessmen on salaries are working 60+ hours a week for no extra pay, get one union guy to work a half hour over fourty and you’d better pay that worker time-and-a-half. Perhaps we see greed differently, however. In any case, what remains important is not that we abolish economic classes but that we don’t let it become a caste-like aristocracy. Not everyone can be a billionare at once, or even ever, but that there are new ones shows the ability to move throughout the economic class structure. This is crucial to fairness.
Speaking of polarity, it seems you’ve got the same dogma, you’ve just switched the “us” and “them” to fit.
Well, should not. “Cannot” would be depending on the level of productivity you would like to achieve and how you view individual citizens as a whole. Rand would say “cannot” meaning “and still keep a great, strong economy full of individuals with unabrogated rights” while I’m not sure what Fred would mean. I thought his whole thing was that there is no meaning, only a drive for power itself?
I think this is a misrepresentation of wealthy persons, but it seems largely a matter of opinion and I’ll just resign myself to this: I disagree that wealthy persons do this as a rule, or even as a majority.
Now that’s interesting! Perhaps you should try reading Shea and Wilson’s “Illuminatus! Trilogy”, I think you’ll like it. The book is comical in its conspiracy, but it does have a great many interesting ideas along these lines that are more or less serious. A favorite of mine, to be sure.
Well, I reserve the right to quibble about the latter statement as one of fact, but I do agree wholeheartedly as a matter of opinion.
Well, Rand wouldn’t be a big fan of just about any of the candidates, though I think she would be very amused (as am I) at the level of anger this election generated. That is, each side claims the choice was obvious, but no one admits that, by sheer virtue of the near-tie (percentage-wise) that the candidates either equally sucked or are equally capable in the eyes of the public. She would take issue with the idea of “compassionate conservativism” as being a completely unsound if not meaningless term (she was always big into semantics), and I know she would have disliked Gore simply because of the tax issue. But, that’s her.
BB, I don’t think you are a Communist. It’s just that I picked up a lot of (kind of) Marxist rhetoric out of the mostly non sequitor posts.
Back to the debate: BB has posted a claim that it is only billionaires that are included in the “rich,” and that anyone who is not a millionaire is “poor.” So you upper middle class (but net worth <$1 million) Americans don’t have anything to worry about, the masses won’t be appropriating your retirement portfolio.
In browsing the 2000 Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans here, I find that those 400 people had about $1.2 trillion dollars (I say had because that was before the late 2000 tech stock meltdown, and a lot of them were techies). That $1.2 trillion is about 1 years worth of spending by the US gov’t (+/- a couple $100 billion). Of course, this list includes more than 100 people who are not billionaires (and that number has grown since the list came out). I guess we could seize all of their assets to pay for 1 years worth of spending, but I don’t think those assets would be worth $1.2 trillion after the seizure process. Bill Gates might be worth tens of billions on paper, but the minute he decides to cash it all in and quit Microsoft, the price of the stock would plummet, and suddenly Bill Gates wouldn’t be so rich anymore.
BB, the group of “the rich” is not a constant. Fortunes are won and lost all of the time. That is one of the great things about this country. On last year’s list, 32 people made their debut. That means 32 got knocked off. One example of a new guy is Vince McMahon (Mr. WWF). He grew up in a abusive broken home, living in a trailer. He has made a fortune ($1.1 billion, according to the list) out of next to nothing, by selling “mindless entertainment” to the “masses”. Of the top 25, eighteen are self-made. Five of the rest are direct heirs of Sam Walton (self-made- WalMart stores). The other two, I’m not sure about, but they are 77 and 80 years old and the source of their fortune is inheritance of Cox Enterprises (I assume by their age and the nature of the business inherited that they are first generation heirs). The point of all of this is that very few of the richest of the rich are “old money.”
Longhorn,
It doesn’t matter if it’s young or old money, or if they are the heirs to the money. The point is that if you make a good wage, with benefits, that could all be gone tomorrow by accident, or on the cooincidental whims of the wealthiest 5% who own over 90% of the assets in this country, and that figure has been rising since 1973. I’ve heard people preach that one can get rich in America, that’s called the lottery mentality, and you can offer ten more examples if you like, I could show you the last winners of the powerball too. My main point here, and has always been, we don’t need to give them a tax break first, nor ever. Try to justify that next time, it was called voodoo economics by GW’s dad once.
BB, where do you get your little buzzwords?
It’s not a lottery mentality if you earn the money by working. My point about the new vs. old rich is that most of the new rich actually went out there and built something to make all of that money. (I know, I know… they only got there by screwing their employees over, or stealing, or whatever other nefarious means you are going to throw out in a barely comprehensible post.)
Also, even if 90% of the stuff is owned by 5% of the people, that 5% is not a static group. 8% of the top 400 got shuffled around in one year(between the 1999 list and the 2000 list).
Going back to the OP, the rich shouldn’t pay anymore than is fair. In my mind, that means that they should pay about the same proportion (or maybe a little more) of the total tax as their proportion of the total earnings, which they do now.
My Not So Modest Proposal: I would actually propose a much flatter (or even completely flat) and simpler tax with a lot knocked off the bottom. I.e.:
- Take your total income.
- Subtract some small multiple (2x, 3x, whatever) of the poverty level.
- Multiply the remaining by some percentage (15, 20, 25%, whatever it takes to pay the bills).
- Write check for amount to IRS (or TXLonghorn, if you prefer :)).
Maybe throw in an EIC for truly working poor (make less than the amount in step 2, get a check back from Uncle Sam). Although this deeply offends my libertarian sensibilities, I am not an ideologue, and this solves a lot of those “unfair to the working poor” arguements by counteracting a lot of regressive state and local taxes.
Any takers?
Well, arl, having been here for a lot of posts by you and other libertarian-types, I would tend to say this characterization by BB is pretty close to the mark, IMHO.
How noble that businessman is! And, if he was the CEO at Xerox who nearly single-handedly appears to have driven that company into the ground in less than 2 years [stock price was above $60 in summer of 1999, now it’s at $7], he will be fired but paid $800,000 per year for life…And that’s the consolation prize, not just for losing the game, but for pretty much blowing up the whole studio (to use some sort of game show analogy here)! Meanwhile, workers are being laid off to get the company back on track.
Really? When?
jshore, my wealthier archenemy! 
Well, it does seem like I worship rich people as far as many discussions go, but that’s because he discussions themselves always focus on the wealth of the rich, never what is done to get there.
That is, I have great respect for people who are that driven, responsible, and possibly that intuitive to be more wealthy than I (and there’s a lot of people more weathy than I! And damn it, I am gonna OWE taxes this year on my damn 3.5K in taxes). I also, to further illuminate the point, have deep respect for people with a better grasp of advanced mathematics than I (whereas I stopped at three dimensional calc), who are better artists than I, who cook better than I do, et cetera ad nauseum.
I have a profound respect for ability. Ability in a free-ish economy often leads to wealth. Thus, almost as a rule, when I see a wealthy person I assume they did something to get there better than I do.
As for the other quote, it has nothing to do with nobility, it was to point that the finger pointing of “greed” is at a mirror.
As well, the CEO has got to be one of the most cited incidents of the terrible things capitalism brings. :shrug: I don’t see it tha way. Then when I point out the brute-force union tactics (literally, a least here in MA where a woman was beaten for nudging her way in when she wasn’t a teamster) I’m told that was just an anomaly. Ehh, there are a lot of assholes out there. No system is perfect. But capitalism is fair IMO (and I know I’m gonna get shit on for that ;)). I will continue to support it long into the future.
ARL,
That is the philosophy of the third world, but fate is usually invoked instead of talent. I never liked the idea of fate much, I’ve been there to dozens of places that strictly adhere to this rule, and the problem is that rich people in the third world usually murdered their way to the top, not people I would like to know. Besides, if they just had roads and sewers and hospitals and schools (sigh) but I guess the wealthy can justify not building them, maybe they don’t mind being associated with poverty. They have plenty of churches alright, no proplem there. My point being, of course, that justifications work best when they aren’t self-serving.
From 1933 to 1973, the tax rate for the highest income bracket was in the 70%-90% range. It was lowered to under 30% during the Regan administration.
cites:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-192.html (The Cato Institute, “The Futility of Raising Taxes” The numbers are down aways, just under Figure 1.)
http://home.att.net/~Resurgence/L-taxgrowth.htm (The Long FAQ on Liberalism, “Myth: Tax Cuts Spur Economic Growth”)
This is probably one of the only points the two sites agree on.
–sublight.
brian
What interests me the most is that there could be a lack of poverty in your eyes (which is what you seem to say) while still retaining wealth. Perhaps I am misunderstanding you, though…
Poverty doesn’t bother me just by its existence. What bothers me is that poor people would be treated differently under law than wealthy ones. They are still people.
“…and the problem is that rich people in the third world usually murdered their way to the top…”
I think dal_timgar would be happy to point this out, but perhaps I’ll save him the trouble. A great many people have murdered their way to the top; indeed, all countries can be considered as a movement in organized murder. This is the damaging thing about rights: they are arbitrary and they must be secured. The arbitrary essence can be hidden under an ideology that suits most people involved, but the securing bit is down and dirty murder, at least in so far as “coming to power” is concerned.
When this happens on a large enough geographical scale we find factions struggling for control. Witness every revolution, border struggle, etc throughout history. In this case there are two sides to the issue, and a person would be hard pressed to not feel that one side was right and the other not, that one side was repressed or so on.
When this happens on a small enough scale, we find a mch less concrete ideology, the ideology of one (or few, anyway, relatively speaking). Witness cults, hate groups, gangs. These groups are most often condemned.
When we consider the two views simultaneously, we see that virtue as it is commonly understood finds its roots in two things: some degree of power over others and the quantity of persons weilding that power.
ALR,
My position is that rights need to understood by all, and passed along accordingly. These rights include the idea of seeking capital improvements to society that would otherwise not exist as a gift to those who claim to own the country on paper. Functional civilization is a government function, time tested and proven over and over. And this public capitalization only works under democratic rule, by degrees of advancement through progress. The previous old-fashiioned (conservative) way that civilizations avoided this was by conquering to gain the capital to improve themselves, obviously problematic and temporary, since it just foments national blood feuds and leads to perpetual misery and decline (a technique of those in power to stay in power).
I repeat: there is an optimal taxation for each particular income, calculated by economists to be zero for the poor, and up to 50% for the wealthy via windfall taxes. Obviously, this does not kill the goose. Communism kills the goose, feudalism kills the goose. Examine each nation today and this is self-evident. We are tax-cutting our way to the past (hence called conservatism) and the past is not the “most good for the most people” as JS Mill outlined in his utilitarianism. Americans can be proud that we coined the term, “standard of living” according to the historian Daniel Boorstein. What a concept. This ideal allows those with talent to excel, otherwise too many with talent do not have a chance and we have a class system institutialized by birth (fate) and that is economic waste and economic stagnation and the death of progress, technological and legal. I seek the most efficient outcome, and I that is why I am rational about liberalism and not sentimental. Sentiments lead to dogma and knee-jerk reactions like Christianity and its communism (Christianity founded communism, still found in verse in the New Testament, which was passed from the Pythagoreans and Essenes). Thanks.
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life is not fair because we aren’t all the same
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the government tax richer people and give it to the poor because if they get too poor they start a revolution.
er, thats it…
Instead of taxing earnings why not tax spending i.e. a tax on HUGE houses, flash cars, designer clothes, restaurants etc.
Some countries ( Sweden ? ) do have a heavy tax burden and lots of social services, no one minds paying the money because you end up living somewhere rather nice.
People vote for tax cuts, not for tax increases hence the problem.
Dude
Sweden has a few other programs which might interest you, then. Like mandatory social service for two years. If you are a conscientious objector to serving in the military, they’d be happy to have you run a day care center, become a fire fighter, and so on instead. After all, you owe yourself to the state. Be glad they only take two years!
The point you missed making was also that people in Sweden are, in fact, raised this way so of course they see little problem with it. But believe me, when they all leave the country on Friday night to head into Copenhagen (sic?) for the cheap beer, they know what lower taxes can do for the soul!
Also, I disagree with the revolution bit. That would put the government on the side of the rich folks which is not entirely true inasmuch as the govrenment is on anybody’s side but its own.