We previously discussed the exodus from France of top earners after the imposition of a confiscatory 75% tax rate. Now England is facing the same shift, according to a new report. More than 16,000 people declared an annual income of more than £1 million during 2009-10. That number fell to just 6,000 this year. This appears to be a combination of people leaving Britain and concerted efforts to avoid income.
We continue to disagree on this blog on tax policy. I opposed the moves in France and England as economically unwise. I also oppose aspects of the Obama plan, though I agree with the need to increase revenue. I believe both Obama and Congress have been incredibly reckless with their budgets and continue to spend wildly without any sense of priority in spending.
Cities like New York also report declines in top earner following heavy tax bills.
George Osborne, the Chancellor, announced this year that the 50p top rate will be reduced to 45p from next April.
Source: Telegraph
TONY C:
empiricist quackery?
3: a theory that all knowledge originates in experience
the practices or pretensions of a quack
1: charlatan 2
2: one making usually showy pretenses to knowledge or ability
are you making showy pretenses to knowledge which only originates in experience?
Zombie
1, December 10, 2012 at 3:29 pm
@Stephen: I’ll agree to your words if they symbolize Rand’s concepts.
> I will debate Rand’s concepts when you translate them into plain English with common dictionary definition.
You merely restate anew your destructive reduction of science to convention. Your intellectual fraud continues. Rands main concepts are new discoveries, not yet sufficiently influential to be in dictionaries. They can be reduced, back down the conceptual hierarchy, to the perception of concrete reality.
>You are a fraud, Grossman
Relative to your anti-conceptual, humiliating submission to convention, yes.
Everything exists, within a limit.
>How do I know she was a fraud? By means you do not comprehend,
O Priest, initiated into the Mysteries of Isis and Ra, tell us humble folk of your revelations from the supernatural. You would have made a good priest in ancient Egypt. They were pleased by their rituals because they were unchanged even in details for centuries.
> inference and logic and the scientific training
These are products of a conceptual/volitional mind in perceptual contact with concrete reality. They are not floating abstractions (deduced from arbitrary axioms) used to subjectively organize perceptual associations. Science as done by Newton, as a perceptually grounded, conceptually organized, induced study of causes, is done and gone except in those parts of science too close to the concrete to be, so far, presently corrupted. The study of man without a mind is a case in point.
>(and natural inclination)
So then the Devil, uh, your neurons, made you do it? Youre not morally praiseworthy for “your” achievements (or destructiveness)? Youre consistent, tho. I must give credit for that.
> I can explain five dimensional integrals to ninth graders in a way they can understand in words they already know
Your intellectual corruption extends beyond university students to children with their partially developed minds. Your rationalism is influential in schools now for environmentalism, feminism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, etc., partly as a corrupt corrective to the empiricist mindlessness of memorizing a chaos of meaningless, superficial, unintegrated facts. Again, reason starts in the perception of concretes and abstracts from them, step by step w/evidence valid for each step, in an unbroken hierarchy to wider or more precise concepts. Thats how Newton went from astronomical observations to universal gravity. Reason does not start in rationalist floating abstractions. Those children that you are conceptually disintegrating do not have the conceptual power or knowledge to understand such very abstract concepts. That takes years of step by step education in facts and method. Their alleged understanding is merely memory and symbol manipulation. This is the method of indoctrination of Nazis, Marxists and religionists.
“[The] enemies of reason seem to know that integration is the psycho-epistemological key to reason . . . and that if reason is to be destroyed, it is man’s integrating capacity that has to be destroyed.” Rand
> you are no different than a religious zealot quoting the Bible at every turn.
And yet, curiously enough, I reduce Rand’s ideas to their base in observation. And I show how the mind works by volitional abstractions, not a passively empty mind waiting for a transcendental revelations. Try that with a burning bush or manna from heaven. Empiricists reject both reason and mysticism because both go beyond perception, one to abstractions from perception and the other to rationalized emotions.
“There are two different methods of learning: by memorizing and by understanding. The first belongs primarily to the perceptual level of a human consciousness, the second to the conceptual.” Rand
“The first is achieved by means of repetition and concrete-bound association (a process in which one sensory concrete leads automatically to another, with no regard to content or meaning). The best illustration of this process is a song…called “Mairzy Doats.” Try to recall some poem you had to memorize in grade school; you will find that you can recall it only if you recite the sounds automatically, by the “Mairzy Doats” method; if you focus on the meaning, the memory vanishes. This form of learning is shared with man by the higher animals: all animal training consists of making the animal memorize a series of actions by repetition and association.” Rand
“The second method of learning—by a process of understanding—is possible only to man. To understand means to focus on the content of a given subject (as against the sensory—visual or auditory—form in which it is communicated), to isolate its essentials, to establish its relationship to the previously known, and to integrate it with the appropriate categories of other subjects. Integration is the essential part of understanding.” Rand
Tony C.
1, December 9, 2012 at 8:04 pm
>I know she reverse-engineered her definitions to lead to her false conclusions;
You know this how? Revelation? Public opinion polls? Rand’s explicit and systematic study of definitions in her Epistemology proves, once again, your intellectual fraud.
“To know the exact meaning of the concepts one is using, one must know their correct definitions, one must be able to retrace the specific (logical, not chronological) steps by which they were formed, and one must be able to demonstrate their connection to their [*]base in perceptual reality[*].”
Rand
Rand rejects rationalism, the floating pseudo-abstractions at the base of your empiricist quackery, for reason.
Bron,
> Are you saying sacrifice is the ultimate end of leftist philosophy? It seems it is the philosophy of conservatives as well.
Yes, liberals dont limit sacrifice. Conservatives limit sacrifice w/God, claiming that Heaven is the reward (or 78 virgins if youre Muslim).
Stephen Grossman:
“As New Leftist, he has no absolute moral values, ie, will sacrifice all values for the sake of sacrifice itself.”
can you expand on this. Are you saying sacrifice is the ultimate end of leftist philosophy? It seems it is the philosophy of conservatives as well. We have been sacrificing our blood and treasure for almost 12 years with nothing to show for it except broken men, broken families, childless parents, parent-less children, an expanding, rights negating government which is basically broke.
What a monument to altruism.
Otteray Scribe
1, December 9, 2012 at 8:20 pm
>Where did President Obama say anything even remotely like you claimed?
Repeating my prior answer, he said raising taxes on the rich was “fair” even tho he knew that it was trivial relative to the debt. I heard a talk on this but dont recall where. Its not critical to my recognition of his nihilism, evidence for which is almost any day’s news. As New Leftist, he has no absolute moral values, ie, will sacrifice all values for the sake of sacrifice itself. He’s intellectually lost, as a modernist/nihilist, inside his consciousness. As Cream sang, “And you know what you know in your head.”
Raff, I know that, but he would never admit it. It is easier to make up stuff and attack the President than to engage in a reasoned argument or explanation.
OS,
You are right that Obama did not sate what Mr. Grossman has claimed.
Grossman,
You did not respond to my question. You just doubled down on the ad hominem. Where did President Obama say anything even remotely like you claimed? Every speech and interview he has ever done is somewhere on the internet, either in text or a video. If you are so certain he said that, give us a link. Furthermore, I do not like things taken out of context and pasted together like a bad ransom note in a B grade movie.
@Stephen: Youre arguing words, not concepts.
Precisely, because we cannot agree on the words, and you have your own loopy Aynish definition of “concepts,” and I won’t play by your (or her) idiotic definitions. As I said, I know she reverse-engineered her definitions to lead to her false conclusions; I am not naive enough to fall into a child’s word trap. As you were.
Tony C.
1, December 9, 2012 at 8:04 pm
@Stephen: Youre arguing words, not concepts.
>Precisely, because we cannot agree on the words
I’ll agree to your words if they symbolize Rand’s concepts. You can name Rand’s concept, selfishness, by any word you please. Call it “chopped liver.” I don’t care. Im not into voodoo. But note, concepts have a specific identity, definition, systematic relation to all of one’s other concepts ,and the concretes of the universe. Concepts are not models of perceived patterns. So name away. Feel free. This is your thing, ie, the arbitrary and conventional.
Tony C.
1, December 9, 2012 at 12:35 pm
>“Metaphysics” uses the “Meta-” prefix which means “beyond the usual,” I do not believe there is any physics but physics. There is no physics above the “usual” physics.
Youre arguing words, not concepts. “Metaphysics” originated from an ancient editor of Aristotle, who placed his study of “first philosophy” after his study of physics in a book, as a chapter 2 follows a chapter one. Metaphysics means the study of the universe as a whole, the necessary context of the special sciences.
“Metaphysics identifies the nature of the universe as a whole. It tells men what kind of world they live in, and whether there is a supernatural dimension beyond it. It tells men whether they live in a world of solid entities, natural laws, absolute facts, or in a world of illusory fragments, unpredictable miracles, and ceaseless flux. It tells men whether the things they perceive by their senses and mind form a comprehensible reality, with which they can deal, or some kind of unreal appearance, which leaves them staring and helpless.”
Rand
“Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute—and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? Are the things you see around you real—or are they only an illusion? Do they exist independent of any observer—or are they created by the observer? Are they the object or the subject of man’s consciousness? Are they what they are—or can they be changed by a mere act of your consciousness, such as a wish?
Science, the rationally principled, systematic study of natural causes, cannot even get started until man accepts the metaphysics of existence, identity and
causality and the epistemology of perception as valid and concepts as logical/volitional integrations of percepts. Mystics and subjectivists have no intellectual framework or even motive for science.
>If you want to call it sacrifice, feel free, because that is not a pejorative term to anybody but the Aynish living their empty lives caring only for themselves and nothing else (because they do not feel love, empathy, or sympathy).
The advocates of sacrifice call it sacrifice as do you in saying its not pejorative. Your contradictions are becoming thicker, like raindrops on a window. That way lies madness!
Then you argue words again, instead of concepts, in attacking, AS DID RAND!, conventional selfishness and the conventional denial of conventional selfishness. Conventionally, ethically, man has only a choice of self without others or others without self. But rational selfishness includes other people as selfish values, trading selfish value for selfish value, in ,eg, work and sex. You imply that a selfish man who loves a woman would be selfish to ignore her, that he would be selfless to have a relationship with her. This is not so much perverse as willfully stupid. Altruism demands first the sacrifice of the mind. Selflessness reduces man to practical and intellectual chaos, which is why our culture is changing from liberal disintegration to religious misintegration.
Man needs as a framework for his thinking and, ignorant of or rejecting a rational framework, man has historically returned to religion after eras of subjectivism. Your pseudo-scientific rejection of consciousness leaves man with the ancient religious claim that its mystical, beyond reason. Everyone is conscious of their consciousness of reality and thus need a rational view of it, the view you will not provide. The irony is that behaviorism is merely a restatement of the religious mind/body split.
> I do not believe any help exists for those such as Ayn, they are born with deformed minds, like a form of blindness that will never let them actually feel what 98% of the planet believes defines life.
The anti-conceptual, anti-volition mentality thats part of religion, is also part of your materialist pseudo-science. Your hidden religion cant refute Rand so you evade her truths by rationalizing the acceptance of her ideas as determined and as contradicting your stand-in for God, popularity.
@Stephen: Your context of knowledge is social approval and an opposition to “redefinition,”
More hilarity. My context of knowledge is as the biological mechanism that it is, and a particularly noisy mechanism at that.
My opposition to “redefinition” is an opposition to subterfuge and purposely misleading use of words that Rand engaged in, which suckered you into being her property and acting on her behalf long after she is dead.
My opposition to “redefinition” is simply advocacy for clear thinking and clear communications; the Aynish redefine words not to enlighten, but to obscure, not to win a fair debate, but to trick and confuse, not to increase knowledge but to decrease and defeat it for their own selfish ends.
Professionals invent jargon as a shorthand, when they invent words or acronyms those are defined as shorthand for a particular set of relationships that have some meaning.
Which means, for the layman, arguments can be made in plain english, it is just a longer process to unravel the jargon. That is what we professionals do when we describe things for laymen, as we often must do.
Redefining an existing word is always a matter of subterfuge; it is an attempt to invoke the original meaning combined with deniability when people try to attack the logic based on the original meaning; it is a way of having your cake and eating it too. An argument that cannot be won in plain English using the plain dictionary meaning of words is simply an invalid argument, and any insistence upon using jargon, or redefined words, is evidence of either stupidity or the intent to mislead and confuse in order to win the argument.
Zombie
@Stephen: Personal attacks are illogical, an evasion of ideas.
>Hilarious; in a post addressed to “Zombie.” The perfect illustration of your hypocrisy and illogic.
My remark is a proud, upfront insult, not a back alley reduction of ideas to psychology. Its also an example of your ideas.
@Stephen: This is a rationalization of the sacrifice of independent judgment, in self and others, to social approval.
>*No, it isn’t.
Your context of knowledge is social approval and an opposition to “redefinition,” ie, independent judgment.
>Thus there is no such thing as a non-selfish act, and “selfish act” is synonymous with “act,” and there is no such thing as an act of “sacrifice,” because every act is a selfish act.
You remain as magnificantly ignorant of Rand’s ethics as the day we began debating some time ago. Rand rejects the fallacy of psychological egoism.
Youre arguing about words, not concepts. The subtitle of her _Virtue Of Selfishness_ is _A New Theory Of Egoism_. New, not the conventional theory you ignorantly attack and which Rand explicitly rejects. Youre as intellectually paralyzed by mere words as a follower of voodoo. You evade my frequent statements of Rands new view of selfishness.
“There is a fundamental moral difference between a man who sees his self-interest in production and a man who sees it in robbery. The evil of a robber does not lie in the fact that he pursues his own interests, but in what he regards as to his own interest; not in the fact that he pursues his values, but in what he chose to value; not in the fact that he wants to live, but in the fact that he wants to live on a subhuman level (see “The Objectivist Ethics”).”
Rand
>This is what I mean when I say the Aynish have their own definitions. Their own definitions of love, sacrifice, selfishness, that rob the words of their original meaning as understood by 98% of the world (in their native languages, of course).
Ive repeatedly said this. How stupid did you have to make yourself to think I would deny it?
>It is YOUR ideas that contradict the…. the “sacrificial” emotions you deride are what hold the normal people together
You change from ethics (needs of man’s life) to politics (hold the normal people together). Thus your ethics is not for man’s life but for society. Your ethics has no advice for man the individual, only for man the unit of society, as Pink Floyd sang it, “another brick in the wall.” Youre a collectivist ,like Hitler and Stalin, whatever the differences of degree. You have no ethics in the strict sense.
>the inability of the Aynish to feel those binding emotions are the reason they do not believe in society in the first place.
Rand’s major fiction, Atlas Shrugged, is (non-basically) about an ideal society & has been widely condemned, including by you, for advocating a capitalist society. Rand never said, implied or suggested an asocial ethics. Youve previously denied that the first sacrifice of altruism is the mind but your comments deny your denial. You make yourself stupid to accept altruism because it has no rational base. You must evade to accept it.
You use your free will to evade, the free will denied in your view of man’s psychology.
@Stephen: Personal attacks are illogical, an evasion of ideas.
Hilarious; in a post addressed to “Zombie.” The perfect illustration of your hypocrisy and illogic.
@Stephen: This is a rationalization of the sacrifice of independent judgment, in self and others, to social approval.
No, it isn’t. A man sacrifices his life to save his post-menopausal wife; we have seen this happen recently. Only the Aynish believe he was deluded to value somebody else’s life more than his own, only the Aynish think he was brainwashed by society. The other 98% of us realize he felt love.
A soldier sacrifices his life to save his brothers-in-arms. Only the Aynish try to recast that as a selfish act. And in doing so, they remove all meaning from the word “selfish,” because the twisted logic that makes knowingly dying to preserve the lives of friends with no blood relation a “selfish” act can be used to characterize everything as a selfish act. Thus there is no such thing as a non-selfish act, and “selfish act” is synonymous with “act,” and there is no such thing as an act of “sacrifice,” because every act is a selfish act.
This is what I mean when I say the Aynish have their own definitions. Their own definitions of love, sacrifice, selfishness, that rob the words of their original meaning as understood by 98% of the world (in their native languages, of course).
It is YOUR ideas that contradict the needs of man’s life; because for the non-psychopaths, the “sacrificial” emotions you deride are what hold the normal people together; they are the glue of the society you do not believe in, and in fact the inability of the Aynish to feel those binding emotions are the reason they do not believe in society in the first place.
Zombie
>Rand tries to limit her discussion to those things she can comprehend as a sociopath.
Personal attacks are illogical, an evasion of ideas.
This is a rationalization of the sacrifice of independent judgment, in self and others, to social approval. Sociopathy is the resulting psychology, the inability to respect others basic need, independent judgment, by destroying people who make independent judgments. Eg, Progressive education, politics. As an opponent of personal attack, I dont claim that youre insane. I dont care. Your ideas contradict the needs of man’s life. The necessary effect on your psychology is of no concern to me.
@Stephen: The building-block of man’s knowledge is the concept of an “existent”
No, it isn’t. The building block of man’s knowledge is the human neuron and how those are organized; and we know quite a bit about that, and it cannot be reconciled with the Aynish “concept” or other BS she claims about how the human mind works. She starts with false premises and arrives at false conclusions. Garbage In, Garbage Out.
@Stephen: But she valued them in the context of selfishness.
“Metaphysics” uses the “Meta-” prefix which means “beyond the usual,” I do not believe there is any physics but physics. There is no physics above the “usual” physics.
They [love, empathy, sympathy] do not exist in the context of selfishness.
If you want to call it sacrifice, feel free, because that is not a pejorative term to anybody but the Aynish living their empty lives caring only for themselves and nothing else (because they do not feel love, empathy, or sympathy).
Which is a pity; but I do not believe any help exists for those such as Ayn, they are born with deformed minds, like a form of blindness that will never let them actually feel what 98% of the planet believes defines life. So like Ayn, they come to despise that kind of sight in the normals and try to label it a weakness, a handicap holding the normals back.
“The building-block of man’s knowledge is the concept of an “existent”—of something that exists, be it a thing, an attribute or an action. Since it is a concept, man cannot grasp it explicitly until he has reached the conceptual stage. But it is implicit in every percept (to perceive a thing is to perceive that it exists) and man grasps it implicitly on the perceptual level—i.e., he grasps the constituents of the concept “existent,” the data which are later to be integrated by that concept. It is this implicit knowledge that permits his consciousness to develop further.”
“To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”
“One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradictory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness.)”
Rand
Zombie (body w/o mind, ie, behaviorist Tony C)
Rand …did not feel…love, empathy, or sympathy.
Yes, in your hidden context of sacrifice. But she valued them in the context of selfishness. Nail yourself to a cross and stop pretending to science. Youre a religionist.
Tony C
>why use the word “existent” when “thing” will do and is more clear?
You dont exist but you thing. Is that the clarity you seek? Your evasion of man’s mind reduces you to impotence, a situation in which the existence of things is a threat to your evasion. Given the Greek, ousia, for thing, you suffer from ousiaphobia.
shano
1, December 8, 2012 at 7:28 pm
>SG simply assumes too much about people he does not know, he already knows what we are with not much evidence or experience. We are figments of his imagination, nothing more or less.
Knowledge is hierarchical. Thinking about car repair is based on the idea of car, regardless of explicit denial. Philosophers, since Plato’s discovery of hierarchy, have been able to infer context from scattered, poorly stated ideas.
>No one, I repeat, no one on this thread has condemned mans knowledge. wtf gave you that idea? It is absurd.
Tony C says we observe something that is not real and that we dont conceptualize it. Hes a nihilist opponent of mind, reducing man to mere observation or even sensation.