Unleash the Mind

[Mentor_and_Liar]

@Hentor_the_Barbarian

Sam, if you’re really interested in having some meaningful dialogue, you’re going to have to educate yourself about the! real world.

You also need to gain some understanding of marginal tax rates and the effect of investment on taxable income.

@Sam_Stone

What would have happened if millionaires were taxed at 75%, as the socialists in France just did? Republicans would generally say that people like Musk wouldn’t have the incventive to do what they did. That’s partly true, but there’s another important effect that Gilder is talking about - a tax rate of 75% would take away 3/4 of Musk’s money, reducing his power and influence, and would hand it over to bureaucrats who haven’t proven they know what to do with it at all.

[Frylock]

Holy shit. Sam! Please tell me that was a slip of the keyboard?!

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Sam_Stone

I’m not sure what there is to debate here, so I’ll call this ‘witnessing’.

I think you pretty much said it all right there.

[Jackmannii]

I remain puzzled about what the essay does to “unleash the mind”.

Capitalism is a useful companion and often serves mankind well, provided it is leashed, and trained not to bite or jump up on people, tearing their clothes and leaving muddy paw-prints.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

@Jackmannii

I remain puzzled about what the essay does to “unleash the mind”.

I think it fell out of an alternate reality in which the College Republicans were the hippies taking psilocybin. “How do we know that the deferred compensation that you see is the same deferred compensation that I see?” Far out, man!

[elucidator]

Its subliminal. The overtext is “Unleash the mind!” in voice of Alastair Cooke. The undertext is “Release the hounds!” by Mr. Burns.

[manila]

Masturbatory circle jerking.

Unbridled capitalism shows none of these attributes. It invariably fails due to greed, is doomed to follow a boom bust existence. Which is generally harder on the majority of the population than on the investing institutions.

Profit motive doesn’t have a social conscience. It is probably the only system that will offer a semblance of stability but only if it is guided and yes regulated to protect pensions funds, the environment and society as a whole.

[foolsguinea]

This is just my response on reading no more than the excerpt in the OP. It’s a bit ad hominem, but that’s what came to mind first–there are familiar notes in the text.

Reads like a something cooked out of Hayek’s optimism in chaos married to Ayn Rand’s belief in the importance of the creative few; mixed together and slightly reformulated.

I note that both Hayek and Rand were children of privilege who ended up in the colonies. A certain self-importance, an optimism in *non-*redistributive social order, and a self-righteous sneering at any science that might prove them wrong. Nothing to do with scientific economics nor true understanding of economics, of course. It’s a puerile impulse but totally understandable for children of gentry and aristocracy.

What’s your excuse, Sam?

I miss Friedman. Anyone else miss Milton Friedman? Man, there was a rightie who halfway thought like a grown-up, or at least a both clever and sober adolescent.

[foolsguinea]

It seriously reminds me of a kid who insists that his brain is so awesome that science can’t measure it and psychology can’t understand him–also he could run faster than a cheetah if you didn’t pull out a clock and measure it. It’s not even about capitalism as it actually exists, or even friendly to it, really, it’s just “I’m magic!”

But hey, if it makes you oppose conglomerates, um, cool? But you know they are a capitalist innovation, right?

@jayjay

I read it and I feel like I just watched someone masturbate.

Oh my word, it is like this–and watching from a vantage point* inside his brain.*

[Lantern]

@foolsguinea

I note that both Hayek and Rand were children of privilege who ended up in the colonies. A certain self-importance, an optimism in *non-*redistributive social order, and a self-righteous sneering at any science that might prove them wrong. Nothing to do with scientific economics nor true understanding of economics, of course. It’s a puerile impulse but totally understandable for children of gentry and aristocracy.

There is a huge difference between Rand and Hayek. Rand was a crank. Hayek was a serious economist and philosopher. His famous article on knowledge and market mechanisms had a huge influence on the way all economists think about the price mechanism. And his business cycle theory, while largely discredited today, is definitely a serious piece of economics and was treated as such by the leading economists of his day.

Gilder, for his part, is definitely closer to Rand than Hayek. And that essay is terrible. There is no real effort to build a serious argument or present evidence. It’s just a series of breathless assertions about the glory of the market.

[Aeschines]

@Sam_Stone

If you tax the rich, you move capital away from the people who have shown themselves to be good stewards of money, and you give it to people who haven’t. The economy suffers as a result.

Most of the rich are not innovators. Many are actual destroyers of capital, such as the miscreants who triggered the financial crisis and ongoing worldwide financial malaise.

Mitt Romney is an example of the classic capitalist who has added no net value to the world, has probably subtracted a bunch, yet has hundreds of millions of dollars in his piggy bank.

Someone mentioned Microsoft. The net value-add of someone like Bill Gates is hard to quantify. Not a lot of real innovation, just critical mass that made everyone have to use their OS and other software. Bill has done good with his money with his foundation but hasn’t gone on to form other value-adding businesses.

The high tax rates on rich people were intended to prevent dynasty-building and the concentration of power in their hands. I think that doing so is on the whole a better deal, even if it will occasionally stop a rich innovator from reinvesting his money in a new innovative venture.

[Aeschines]

And the quoted material is disgracefully bad. Really, Sam Stone?

[John_Mace]

You have to imagine the thread title being said by Liam Neeson.

[RitterSport]

@John_Mace

You have to imagine the thread title being said by Liam Neeson.

I was thinking that it reminded me more of the weird baby-person inside the rebel leader from the first Total Recall movie. “Unleash your mind…your mind…unleash your mind…”

[MOIDALIZE]

Hey, witness this:

At the end of the Cold War many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation-state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, the former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation warfare and the inability of national armies to adapt to it. The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been numerous books about globalization and how it would eliminate borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.

I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time—for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

Stephen Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5-million birthday party, believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: “You have to have skin in the game. I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

But millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes do pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive, and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues. In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues. By 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950. By 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent. So who has skin in the game?

It is no coincidence that as the Supreme Court has been removing the last constraints on the legalized corruption of politicians, the American standard of living has been falling at the fastest rate in decades. According to the Federal Reserve Board’s report of June 2012, the median net worth of families plummeted almost 40 percent between 2007 and 2010. This is not only a decline when measured against our own past economic performance; it also represents a decline relative to other countries, a far cry from the post-World War II era, when the United States had by any measure the highest living standard in the world. A study by the Bertelsmann Foundation concluded that in measures of economic equality, social mobility, and poverty prevention, the United States ranks 27th out of the 31 advanced industrial nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Thank God we are still ahead of Turkey, Chile, and Mexico!

This raises disturbing questions for those who call themselves conservatives. Almost all conservatives who care to vote congregate in the Republican Party. But Republican ideology celebrates outsourcing, globalization, and takeovers as the glorious fruits of capitalism’s “creative destruction.” As a former Republican congressional staff member, I saw for myself how GOP proponents of globalized vulture capitalism, such as Grover Norquist, Dick Armey, Phil Gramm, and Lawrence Kudlow, extolled the offshoring and financialization process as an unalloyed benefit. They were quick to denounce as socialism any attempt to mitigate its impact on society. Yet their ideology is nothing more than an upside-down utopianism, an absolutist twin of Marxism. If millions of people’s interests get damaged in the process of implementing their ideology, it is a necessary outcome of scientific laws of economics that must never be tampered with, just as Lenin believed that his version of materialist laws were final and inexorable.

Revolt of the Rich

[septimus]

Thanks for witnessing, MOIDALIZE. What is especially annoying about the hypocritical “You have to have skin in the game" is that the tax burden is passing from the rich to the middle class. Consider this graph. Payroll taxes were less than half of Individual Income Taxes in the 1960’s but may have passed to the front at the end of Bush 2008. Corporate taxes fall; aid to families and schools fall; there is class warfare in this country but the right-wing have got the warmakers and victims reversed.

And there is no sense of proportion on their calls to lower taxes on the rich. Taxes are already low? Lower them some more! I think if the tax table were inverted, so that the rich paid zero there’d be calls to increase taxes on the poor in order to give subsidies (negative taxes) to the Job Creators! :smack:

[ElvisL1ves]

@foolsguinea

It seriously reminds me of a kid who insists that his brain is so awesome that science can’t measure it and psychology can’t understand him–also he could run faster than a cheetah if you didn’t pull out a clock and measure it. It’s not even about capitalism as it actually exists, or even friendly to it, really, it’s just “I’m magic!”

But, oddly, no mention of Harrison Bergeron anywhere. Maybe their minds are unleashed enough to realize that’s fiction?

The strawmanned concept of something called “The Left” that not only exists but is monolithic is as strong in **Sam **as ever, I see. So there’s still some unleashing left to do.

[Hentor_the_Barbarian]

Apparently when some people unleash their mind, it runs away.

[foolsguinea]

@Aeschines

Most of the rich are not innovators. Many are actual destroyers of capital, such as the miscreants who triggered the financial crisis and ongoing worldwide financial malaise.

That’s what gets me. The argument misunderstands what capitalism is, and defends one set of what such a philosophy might call looters and I might call lords against another. Given a choice between paying rents to Steve Forbes’s class or paying taxes to FDR–or even to Uncle Joe–yeah, I’d take the socialist. A socialist will invest in educating a mass of people and increase the incidence/speed of the next innovation. (Not that Uncle Joe didn’t have other problems. So a somewhat more liberal Uncle Joe, then.)

@Lantern

There is a huge difference between Rand and Hayek. Rand was a crank. Hayek was a serious economist and philosopher.

You’re right, of course, I was conflating three different viewpoints a bit sloppily. Yes, Hayek was smarter than this kook. (If still a kooky optimist.)