There is an interesting economics column in the Wall Street Journal on the similarities between the Greek meltdown and our own fiscal policies. I have long been a critic of the wild spending of both Congress and President Obama, including the recent proposal to simply pay for an over $200 million short-range missile program for Israel (here). This article discusses the possible disaster awaiting the United States as our leaders blissfully assume that a recovering economy will pay for their various programs and pet projects.
The column questions the logic of being able to tax their way out of this deficit. While I am socially liberal, I tend to be fiscally conservative and I find the current situation extremely alarming.
This article is interesting for its proposition that higher taxes are not able to close such a gap:
The feds assume a relationship between the economy and tax revenue that is divorced from reality. Six decades of history have established one far-reaching fact that needs to be built into fiscal calculations: Increases in federal tax rates, particularly if targeted at the higher brackets, produce no additional revenue. For politicians this is truly an inconvenient truth.
This is a different take on the problem. I have always been skeptical of the “spend out way out of the crisis” approach — which is an awfully convenient theory for members who are always inclined to spend more and put off payments to the future. Once back in power, the Democrats seemed to immediately fulfill a stereotype of higher spending and immediately turning to higher taxes as the solution. This is precisely the course that led to the last Republican takeover of Congress. In their defense, Democrats faced a crisis left to them by the Republicans and particularly George Bush who was one of the greatest spendthrifts in our history. However, they have shown no serious commitment to tackle these dire economic forecasts — gushing money in Iraq and Afghanistan while watching cities and states shutting down basic programs. Our debt is now growing at a record pace — roughly $5 billion a day (here).
This is not to excuse the Republicans who, under Bush, showed no restraint and left Obama with a massive debt. I simply have little faith in our current economic policies or a sense that leaders are seriously addressing the growing threat to the nation from our growing debt. Various countries have raised alarm over our debt and the similarities to the Greek meltdown, here.
For the column, click here.
@Byron:
>> “The presupposition of expressing any views regarding how society should be organized is that man is a rational animal.”
See, you love these absolute statements that are just false. In fact, I could say the exact opposite: We can pre-suppose that man is an irrational animal, which he is, and organize a society that forces him to be rational.
This was my point about emotions; they are irrational, and they rule. Rationality kicks in later, and always serves the emotions.
Here is a true story. I write from ten year old memory, so my details may be off, but the story is true:
***************
A young single man in his early twenties is standing on a bridge, with other people, that crosses a river. They are admiring the raging river, swollen by storm, about 50 feet below.
The young man is standing at the rail, and according to witnesses, suddenly and explosively, he vaults the rail and dives headfirst into the river below. The astonished pedestrians look for him, and see him surface on the other side, down-river. With one arm he holds above water a three year old girl. They call 911, and man and child are rescued downstream, both alive and conscious.
When interviewed after the fact, the man claims he had no idea what he was doing. He had never dived off more than the high-dive at the local pool; he was not a fan of swimming. More interestingly, he did not remember diving or seeing the girl. He said in his memory, one instant he was looking at the water, then he was suddenly surfacing and swimming hard toward the girl, then his next memory was grabbing her arm and his memory was continuous from that point. He remembered nothing between the gaps. Not seeing her, not diving, and not how he managed to reach her.
*******************
This young man’s act of heroism was not decided upon rationally. He did not consider the options and conclude rationally he should risk his life and high dive fully clothed into a river of unknown depth with a current obviously strong enough to drown HIM, to save a child that might already be drowned herself.
Apparently, his frontal cortex was not involved in this decision at all, or if it was, it was acting purely as a logistical consultant to the amygdala calling the shots. It is adrenaline and other stress hormones that shut down memory, and produce this “still shot” fragmentation.
A society based on the assumption that people are rational will fail, because in EVERYBODY rationality is luxury employed only in times of low stress. The frontal cortex (the seat of rationality) is a late evolutionary development, and hard-wired to be subordinate to the underlying mechanisms driven by raw emotions.
Rationality is a wonderful tool and nothing more. A society must be founded on the presupposition that man is an EMOTIONAL animal CAPABLE of rationality. The point of law is to encourage rational behavior and prevent the short-sighted emotional behavior that, rationally, we can know is likely to harm one’s self and others.
Rationality is a servant of the emotions. It can temporarily control emotions or suppress actions based on emotions — by using other emotions, such as anticipated fear, or pain, or shame, or guilt, about the consequences of those actions.
But people measure what is “rational” by balancing the short, medium and long term consequences in terms of EMOTIONS. I went to work, even when I hated it, because I wanted the emotional satisfaction of financial security and living in comfort more than I wanted to quit. I washed dishes for my last 18 months of high school (I was on my own and had to pay rent and support myself) because I didn’t want to spend my LIFE washing dishes.
What people call “rational” decisions are ultimately net positives on the EMOTIONAL scale; and what people derogatorially call “emotional” decisions are generally positive in the short term and negative in the long term, on the EMOTIONAL scale. Society and law are about channeling people’s emotions; and if you ASSUME they are rational and can suppress or control their own emotions, your implementation will be riddled with fatal incorrectible flaws and doomed to failure.
@Byron:
Your sneaking suspicion is a result of your sneaky behavior. I am an atheist and believe in nothing supernatural whatsoever. I do believe there are unexplained phenomenae, but I believe these are rooted in explicable interactions between matter.
Included among the supernatural inventions I do not believe in are the Big Bang and Inflation and String Theory, God and Jesus and souls. All are fictions, either without evidence, or defying logical explanation, or dependent (as in the case of Inflation) on imaginary physics that cannot be observed, replicated or tested.
I do believe in the natural random electrochemical origin of life, i.e. no intelligence or guidance needed, I believe in evolution, and the natural origin of emotions and rationality.
I am a scientist, both by my lifelong mental nature and, for the last 6 years since I chose it, a research scientist by profession. My field is highly technical and exacting, but despite my scientific education, my success has been due primarily to teaching myself what motivates people.
I have no respect for authority; that is the WORST kind of supernatural thinking, even more harmful than religion. In my mind, who said it is usually immaterial; all that matters is content. To be sure Thomas Jefferson generated a lot of cogent insight, and once somebody has a record like that it demands we work harder to understand their points that seem misguided, but the conclusion can still be that their point is just wrong. Nobody is infallible. Including me.
With that bit of biography (certainly more than you have volunteered to me), we surely have common ground. You speak of a moral right to protect your own life and property, and a separate moral obligation to NOT attack somebody else’s life and property.
I accept that to a large extent. I don’t know what YOU mean by “moral,” but what I mean is what Thomas Jefferson said; “we find these truths SELF-EVIDENT.” In mathematics, the self-evident statements are called axioms. When students ask how we know that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, mathematicians admit they don’t know. We just know that. We can point out that any divergence from the straight line is necessarily a longer path THAN the straight line, but that cheats: It uses the idea we are trying to prove! Because it claims the line from the point where the divergence starts until where the divergence re-meets the original straight line is the shortest distance between those points. So we just call it an axiom, or axiomatic.
Likewise, we can try to reason about why murder or assault is wrong. I certainly agree, but I don’t think we can stop at some inherent “right to life.” We have had no problem waging wars, or putting criminals to death. (And I believe in the death penalty for cases of pre-meditated murder, and murder by gross negligence.)
So, what is the underlying principle? Where are your limits? If a stranger kills your child while you are away, do you have the right to investigate the crime, identify the perpetrator and execute him on your own? If not, why not?
If the state investigates, identifies the suspect and ultimately finds him guilty, what gives THEM the moral right to put the killer to death?
The fact that there is any right to kill somebody else (e.g. in self-defense) demands a superceding principle or morality that strips them of their right to life by some action. In other words, if the right to life can be lost by doing something “wrong,” there must be something MORE important that trumps the right to life, and cannot be violated no matter what.
And that has to be true in your mind; or you would be a pacifist, unable to advocate using force in self-defense.
What is that more fundamental moral principle that trumps a criminal’s right to life?
Buddha:
a quote having to do with coercion:
“The presupposition of expressing any views regarding how society should be organized is that man is a rational animal.”
In other words, let people take decisions based on their ability to discern what is good for them as individuals. Taxation is coercion and makes people behave in a different manner. Our current government (not necessarily the Obama administration but all previous administrations in the last 100 years say) is coercive through it’s various rules and regulations. Most not very good and intended to protect a minority of irrational actors from themselves, while the rest of us who do not need protecting change our behavior to adjust to these rules and regulations.
Buddha:
We need government as an umpire to protect our rights, I have never said we didn’t. I don’t have a problem with taxation, I just think we are paying too much and that money taken for taxes is not being used to create jobs.
Coercion is a form of force that impedes your ability to use your own judgement to take decisions right for you. Or at least that is my take on it. An offer you cant refuse is really no offer at all.
We just had a local story about 2 guys breaking into a home and killing the owner, personally if a person is breaking into your home there is really no way to know if he is just a burglar or is willing to kill you. You don’t know someones intent until it is too late.
Byron,
“Moral right”. Now there’s an oxymoron. But I’ll let you chew that cud on your own. Pssst! You shouldn’t use the word “moral” if you’re going to accuse someone of theocratic thinking. **wink wink nudge nudge**
As to owning your life, it is indeed yours. Within the context of society. Because all this property and the associated rights you’ve been arguing about?
Wouldn’t mean jack monkey squat without civilization and the laws to protect it, your rights and your person.
Unless you can kick the asses of all comers who just want your stuff willy-nilly. Because that’s the law of the jungle and the consequence of anarchy. Welcome to Thunderdome!
As to protecting your property? Try using lethal force to protect your property and see how well that works out for you. They’ll love you in lockup. Or have you forgotten stories like this: http://jonathanturley.org/2008/11/02/south-carolina-man-shoots-and-kills-12-year-old-trick-or-treater/. Or this: http://jonathanturley.org/2010/03/02/perils-of-the-press-florida-men-arrested-for-chasing-and-shooting-at-newspaper-carriers/. The exceptions for lethal force do not apply to protecting your property, only your life and the lives of others in exigent circumstances.
As to the results of your labor? This isn’t China yet. No one is saying you can’t have the fruits of your labor. You just have to pay your share for maintaining society. The very same society that afforded you the safety, infrastructure and opportunity to make money and buy stuff in the first place. Now if you feel your being taxed without proper representation, that’s another argument. Just not the one your making . . . or more accurately “wandering about” since you aren’t really making an argument at this point.
If you think that taxation is wrong? Wesley Snipes has a financial adviser you should call. And an attorney too. You’ll need one if you take the advice of the other. Just ask Wesley. He’ll tell you the order of that operation.
I’d like to hear your answer to Tony’s question about coercion too.
It’s quite relevant.
Tony C:
Value doesn’t necessarily mean monetary.
You have a moral right to protect your life and property, but you cannot initiate force against another. You may respond if force is used against you.
Seems pretty clear to me.
And by the way if you were a neighbor and had lung problems I would not have a bonfire, you know do unto others . . .
I have no desire to live a primitive existence, but have at it if you want. Just don’t make me be part of it, although from your posts I have a feeling you are the type to jam it down my throat whether I wanted to or not.
We don’t have any common ground from which to start. To me my life is my own, I don’t know what you believe. But I have a sneaking suspicion that you think there is some higher power that we should be supplicating to, whether it be the state or some mystical magical mystery tour.
If I have a right to my life and if I need to expend effort to support my life then it follows that the result of that effort is mine and mine alone to dispose of how I see fit. If I cannot have the result of my productive energy (work), I am no more than a slave.
@Byron:
If I don’t know WHY you believe as you do, then you will simply assert forever that I am wrong. I cannot start from any common ground, if I don’t know where the common ground is. If you are simply an emotional child that doesn’t want people tellin’ him what to do, you won’t have a rationale; you will just have a pouting refusal to engage in any reasoned discussion. If that is the case I haven’t wasted my time, for I have at least demonstrated THAT.
@Byron:
I do believe in individual rights. Quite likely I believe in more of them than you do, which is why I am willing to legally constrain what you (or businesses) do: To ensure you don’t violate those rights of others that I believe in so strongly.
I have what I think are excellent reasons, both for individuals and for society as a whole, to believe in these rights.
But the point of this discussion is not for me to pontificate, but for YOU to elucidate the root cause of your beliefs. That is why we start with the obvious: WHY is coercion wrong? WHEN is coercion wrong? (Hint: We coerce criminals all the time, imprison and kill them regularly, so these aren’t ALWAYS wrong.)
Stop deflecting and answer the question.
Tony,
I do not disagree with any of that.
@Buddha:
It is a matter of degree, I suppose. I see money as a tool, and usually I see compensation as a measure of value added. I do not believe most CEOs add millions of dollars in value. There are exceptions; Steve Jobs come to mind. I do believe different people contribute more and less. In my rather technical consulting field I was a rescue manager, a person that could save a certain kind development project on the verge of collapse. I was expensive, but I delivered. I saved companies millions of dollars in sunk costs (versus giving up or throwing good money after bad), and I felt paid fairly for the value I added. Back to emotions — Some of my customers were downright giddy at my success; I didn’t just save projects, I saved careers and saved companies.
What most CEOs are engaged in, IMO, is simple theft. They have formed a cabal with the board to engage in stealing the assets of their shareholders for their personal use. By definition, both their job and the job of the board members is to act in the best financial interest of the shareholders as a whole. Paying yourself $10 million a year because otherwise you might quit does not fit that definition. This is a violation of trust and outright embezzlement; it is theft.
@Byron:
Oh, I see. You say I am wrong so I must be wrong. How about this idea: Provide either evidence or reason explaining what you think I got wrong? I know evidence and reason are radical concept in your mind, but give it a shot. It just might work.
>>> There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life.
Ah. Then you believe it is fundamentally wrong to put murderers that have intentionally killed others to death. I also presume you believe it is fundamentally wrong to defend one’s physical property with lethal force. I am not talking about when your life is at stake, I am talking about something like a collection of gold coins that somebody is trying to steal from you. By your statement, defending them with lethal force is verboten.
>> the right to life means […] the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life.
Yet more overblown foppery (‘furtherance’? Really?), but I think I get your point.
So if you enjoy bonfires I have to let you have them on your property, even though the smoke irritates my lungs, even though sparks might trigger fires, even though if the damn thing collapses it might start a wildfire that consumes my property, even though it pollutes the earth — As long as none of that stuff has happened YET, and even though if it DID happen you cannot cover the cost of it, you still get to play with fire.
If my twisted neighbor is fulfilled by and enjoys exposing his erect penis to pre-pubescent girls, I must allow that too; because what harm has it done these girls REALLY? After all, we cannot pass laws that people shouldn’t have to see what they don’t want to see, that would be ridiculous! Thus, I presume according to you, there is no imagery that can or should ever be outlawed, because your philosophy doesn’t allow distinctions like that to be made.
The point of the communes is not whether they thrived or failed, the point is that communes can exist for years off the land without outside trade at all. Some have been island communities; I read of one years ago that was ingenious: They collectively built a fish trap. I saw a photo. It is basically two long walls coming together at one end like a V, about a foot apart, but it isn’t closed there: It turns into a kind of spiral at the end. Fish swimming with the current get funneled into the spiral, take two turns around to end up in an open circle a few yards across. Fish small enough to swim between the sticks escape. Although the “rewind” path is an open path out of the trap, fish are too dumb to find it. (Pickets across the open end, a foot apart or so, keep out sharks and dolphins). The commune members could just spear or net the fish in the open circle; there were so many. Between gardening on the island and more fresh fish than they could eat, they could have survived indefinitely. That they chose not to do that is immaterial, the point is they were able to SURVIVE without requiring “property rights.” Since the RIGHT TO SURVIVAL is the axiomatic hook upon which your quoted author hangs his entire argument for property rights, and since humans have been proving they are capable of surviving without property rights for tens of thousands of years, his entire argument is falsified. It is based on a false premise.
My arguments are sound. I can’t say that about yours, because you don’t have any! All you have are assertions.
The “value” you allude to is emotional. Naturally I have more time and emotion invested in little Kim than I do in little Debbie; but love is an emotion, and by definition emotions cannot be rational decisions; otherwise the two words mean nothing. Emotions are fundamentally irrational.
I love little Kim, and I now love adult Kim. I value her life, then and now, more highly than my own. “Value” is a bad word; there is no amount of money I would take, no power over others, that could ever induce me to sacrifice her life.
That is not some rational conclusion I have arrived at that might be reversed by new facts or evidence; that is an emotion. Trying to quantify or rationalize emotions is a pointless exercise. Emotions and rational thought are separate realms. Whether people like it or not, rational thought is the servant of emotional thought, not the other way around, and this is proven almost daily in undergraduate psychology course across the country. People rationalize what they want to be true, and WHY they want it to be true can be analyzed, but is usually rooted in intractable emotions.
Tony C:
most communes dont do so well, they usually have to sell to the broader market to subsist.
There was a huge movement in the mid 1800’s trying to implement the communal life style here in the US, almost every single one failed and miserably. The ones that didnt embraced market reforms.
But go on believing that fiction if you wish.
Mespo:
and that is what the Treasurey Department is doing to our wealth today.
Tony C:
you are wrong on every single one of your “refutations”.
Bottom line, little Kim has value to you. Why does she have value to you and not little Debbie?
Yep, murder, rape, coercion, theft and fraud are wrong. They are the use of force against your person, which you own and have a right to.
“A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context. There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfillment and the enjoyment of his own life. (Such is the meaning of the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.)”
Now my question to you:
Do you believe in individual rights or not?
I thought the goal of communism was to dispense with the state?
@Byron:
No, it does not speak to the issue. You refuse to answer the question, which is WHY is this a good thing!!!
Here is your quote, sentence by sentence.
““Man is an integrated being of matter and consciousness who exists by the use of his rational faculty.”
Right. My daughter Kim is now an adult member of the family of man, and also an integrated being of matter and consciousness. As she was when she was little. Let’s call her little Kim.
“In order to continue existing, he must implement the products of his reasoning in the material realm, organizing things to achieve a material outcome which contributes to his survival.”
So, as I understand it, little Kim has used her rational faculties to decide she must apply peanut butter to raisin bread and eat it.
(What overblown bullshit you like. This is not eloquent, it is pretentiously pompous. But the style is not the point, let me translate.)
“If force is used against this process at any step, that which is needed for his survival cannot come into being.”
So I told little Kim, “Sweetie, it is only one hour to dinner, and you can’t just eat peanut butter and raisin bread five times a day.” She insisted she could indeed survive on said diet and in fact preferred it, even more than tacos, so apparently I was preventing what was necessary for her survival from coming into being. It is now clear to me why her college GPA was only 3.92.
I see two logical errors in this line. First, it is assuming that people only act for their survival, but people act primarily for self gratification, not survival. Survival is 2000 calories a day; the work necessary to acquire that is less than 30 minutes, even as a day laborer working under the table for cash (mowing lawns, clearing fields, emptying a warehouse, etc.) I know this from first-hand interviews with such laborers. Thus, this line conflates ‘survival’ with ‘desire’ (probably purposely to increase the impact of the next line).
Second, it is assuming that people somehow magically know what is needed for their survival. If that were true we’d have no crack whores, or bankrupted people, or divorce, or imprisoned criminals or murderers, or lottery winners that went bankrupt, or indeed, even the current BP oil disaster.
Next line:
“A concept is therefore needed to denote man’s morally and legally sanctioned freedom of action with regard to his use of materials-the concept of property rights.”
I just want to point out that several hunter-gatherer tribes (with modern human brains and intellgence) have had no concept of “property rights” outside of their own personally carried property. They survived tens of thousands of years in that state, so clearly, no such concept of property rights is “necessary” to survival.
In fact, I suspect the concept of “property rights” was invented to get a handle on what we **inherently** understand as being right and wrong, namely that you can’t just take the fine shell necklace I made, or murder me for it, or the rest of the tribe will put you down.
I think this is a fallacious logical leap that ends the argument; but I will stipulate it for now in order to continue this analysis.
“Since politics concerns the nature of government, and the essence of government is force, the full politico-economic application of property rights is a system in which government protects an individual’s property rights from violation by others, but does not itself violate them.”
Wow, how overblown and completely empty this conclusion is!
First, The essence of government is not FORCE, unless you are talking about a dictator or king that rules by force of arms. To make that distinction, I will refer to “representative government” which we will assume is for the overall good of the people, and voluntarily empowered by the majority of the people.
All laws demand compliance by force. A parking ticket can result in your death if you insist upon escalating the dispute to the point of violently resisting arrest. Force is not the essence of government, it is the essence of any law anywhere at anytime by anybody. EnFORCEment of the law is the essence of civilization, not government.
The essence of representative government is assent to government instead of coercion. In order to live in a civilized society with rules that protect us, we voluntarily give a government, still ruled by us, the sole authority to use force, or the threat of force, to demand compliance with established law. The government and the lawmakers are composed of people we select and vote into office, and periodically we are given the right to vote them out of office. In the USA, they have always stepped down after losing an election, without exception.
Second, the primary purpose of government is NOT protecting property rights. If that were true, a communist society where nobody owns anything would have no need of government. The primary purpose of government, and the reason even hunter gatherering tribes have chieftans, is to protect personal rights.
Conflating “property” and “self” is a false equivalence. Your body is not your “property,” it is far more important than that. Your property does not feel pain or joy or lust. It has no hopes, no sense of anything. People have that, and considering their body “property” is demeaning, degrading, and silly. I can sell my property because it is divisible from me, I cannot sell my brain, or buy a new one, because it is indivisible from me, because it IS me. People are not property. If a couch is burnt it can be replaced, if an eight year old girl is forcibly raped there is no way to replace her damaged body, or damaged mind, and make her whole.
Third, WhAT THE HELL ARE PROPERTY RIGHTS? How can government protect an individual’s property rights without violating property rights unless we know what property rights ARE? I’m not so sure we even have a non-circular definition of “property” for that matter, much less what “rights” are.
This quoted passage does nothing to explicate your stance. Why are property rights a good thing? You seem to think they are necessary to survival, but clearly property is not necessary to survival; not even work is necessary to survival. What little work my daughter did as a child was not actually necessary for her survival; I would have ensured that outcome even if she was incapable of work.
Pre-civil war slaves in America owned no property, not even their own bodies (female slaves were routinely raped by slave owners and their sons, as was their right by law. Male slaves were routinely beaten, crippled, and sometimes put to death, and this was legal action).
Yet the slave community survived for centuries. In various communes both in the USA and abroad, small communes of people have voluntarily surrendered all property rights to majority rule, and survived as a group like that for years. They worked, but decided as a group what to work on and how to share the work load. I am pretty sure that for tens of thousands of years humans wandered the earth and lived off the land with no concept of property rights, and still survived.
You have still failed to answer the question: WHY is murder wrong, WHY is coercion wrong, WHY is theft wrong? If we have “property rights,” what makes that a GOOD thing?
I have my own opinions on this, but my point is to understand YOUR argument, if indeed you even have one. I am beginning to suspect you have no reasoned argument, that you have not thought any of this through at all, and that you are just completely enamored by this purposely misleading literature of selfishness. Feel free to prove me wrong — Explain WHY murder, rape, coercion, theft and fraud are wrong. We both KNOW they are wrong. My question is whether you know WHY they are wrong.
mespo,
That Franklin was a sharp guy.
Cake anyone?
“Is there a Global War Between Financial Theocracy and Democracy?”
*****************
It always has been. Here’s Benjamin Franklin’s take on the American Revolution:
When he arrived [in London], he was surprised to find rampant unemployment and poverty among the British working classes… Franklin was then asked how the American colonies managed to collect enough money to support their poor houses. He reportedly replied:
“We have no poor houses in the Colonies; and if we had some, there would be nobody to put in them, since there is, in the Colonies, not a single unemployed person, neither beggars nor tramps.”
In 1764, the Bank of England used its influence on Parliament to get a Currency Act passed that made it illegal for any of the colonies to print their own money. The colonists were forced to pay all future taxes to Britain in silver or gold. Anyone lacking in those precious metals had to borrow them at interest from the banks.
Only a year later, Franklin said, the streets of the colonies were filled with unemployed beggars, just as they were in England. The money supply had suddenly been reduced by half, leaving insufficient funds to pay for the goods and services these workers could have provided. He maintained that it was “the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament which has caused in the colonies hatred of the English and . . . the Revolutionary War.
(From “Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System — The Sleight of Hand That Has Trapped Us in Debt and How We Can Break Free”)
Is there a Global War Between Financial Theocracy and Democracy?
Byron,
The pie getting bigger? That’s not an infinite progression. That it is an infinite progression is a myth. Expansion is always limited by resources. The number of hammers at any given time is a finite number.
As to a larger claim on talent or wealth? It is only fair that those who enjoy more of societies benefits shoulder more of the burden of maintaining society. It’s called equity. It’s called social responsibility. Some would consider it the most basic civic duty: the necessary work(s) required for civilization to continue. Or in the words of Ben Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
And get your dander down. I didn’t call you a sociopath. I said your base idea of economics is the same rationale a sociopath would use to justify their acts. I don’t think you’re a sociopath. Just terribly misguided when it comes to your understanding of the intersection of society, law and economics. You are a victim of wishful thinking if I were forced to make the call. Rand poisoning. But it’s that kind of wishful thinking that enables sociopaths. Because avoiding responsibility for their acts is the modus operandi of sociopaths.
Buddha:
Capitalism creates enough hammers for everyone, the pie gets bigger it doesn’t get smaller. If it did we wouldn’t be where we are today.
And yes money is a tool and some have the ability to make it and some don’t. Life isn’t fair, Bill Gates has a bunch more than I do but I don’t want any of his, he earned it not me.
I don’t have a moral right to another mans life, he owes me nothing except the recognition of my humanity if that makes me a sociopath then so be it. But to make a claim on another mans life because he is more gifted or talented or does well at business is not right.