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
@Stephen: There are no metaphysical facts about life, Stephen, there is nothing beyond physics, there is nothing supernatural. You are wasting your time and your breath. And your life, I would wager.
I strongly advocate for compromising between pure socialism and pure capitalism, since neither absolute can produce a functional, stable society.
And values do not further or threaten my life in any way. Of course maybe I just don’t speak your crazy moon language, and you do not seem able to speak anything else.
Zombie,
Tony C.
1, December 11, 2012 at 3:47 pm
@Stephen: There are no metaphysical facts about life, Stephen, there is nothing beyond physics, there is nothing supernatural.
Metaphysics is the study of nature as a whole, not any supernatural realm, as Ive repeatedly said and as youve repeatedly evaded. Matter and energy are unconditional as a whole. Life exists as conditional. Man must value his own life as his highest value or he suffers and dies. This exists along a continuum depending upon the individual’s choices. Thats the nature of life as a whole. Youre continued evasion of consciousness is noted. Perhaps your life is explained without reference to your ideas and values.
>I strongly advocate for compromising between pure socialism and pure capitalism, since neither absolute can produce a functional, stable society.
As Ive said, youre a fascist, an irrationalist, an anti-system advocate of govt economic controls w/o state ownership, the politics of 1940s fascists.
>And values do not further or threaten my life in any way.
Value drinking rat poison. Life requires that living organisms value their life more than all other values to maintain living. You value eating, a value objectively needed to remain alive. No fact of physics changes that.
Its understandable why an advocate of sacrifice does not want to consider his life as a whole but merely consider disintegrated parts. Unfortunately for your evasions, consciousness is an integrate whose parts cant be separated from each other. Every state and process of consciousness affects every other state and process. This explains the religion of complexity-worship among contemporary intellectuals. They dont want to know their life as a whole, given their morality of sacrifice.
@Otteray: Yeah, basically the Eureka story. However, there is another lesson to be learned from that story, in regard to “knowledge.” The story goes that Archimedes noticed the water rise as he lowered himself into a bath. In that moment of inspiration, what happened in his head that let him suddenly be certain of the solution, and that it would work?
In one moment he knew something new that nobody in the entire world knew except for him, and it was contained entirely in his head, so that was “knowledge” being created. But whatever happened in that moment, it happened in the brain, the pieces of his puzzle were joined together there.
I mean literally joined together; what happened in that “insight” was the creation of a neural path that linked together different mental models of how the world worked to produce a way to measure a volume independent of weight, exploiting the incompressibility of water. Combined with the already known means of measuring a weight independent of volume (scales), that would permit the computation of density.
OS:
Eureka!!
@Bron: The idea that liberals do not limit sacrifice is utter bullshit. The Aynish seem incapable of thinking in anything other than black and white, they cannot reason unless everything is either 0% or 100%. This “either or” thinking is how they arrive at the ludicrous notion that people are either 100% selfish or 100% selfless, there is nothing in-between for them, there is no sub-division of time or space or money in which one can be selfish for two days and selfless for three, or help others with some income and be self indulgent with the rest.
It is why psychopaths are drawn to the psychopathic philosophy of Rand; because psychopaths are incapable of emotions that are not selfish in nature, and Rand lets them be proud of that disability.
Tony,
I am reminded of a story about Thomas Edison. He asked one of his associates to tell him the exact volume of his light bulb. After some time elapsed, his associates came to him with pages of calculations and told Edison that such a calculation was beyond their mathematical capability. Without saying a word, Edison picked up a light bulb, plunged it into a graduated beaker half full of water and handed it to the associate.
@Bron: How are you going to integrate a cone if you dont know what it is?
First, gbk beat me to it. Second, I did say ninth graders, didn’t I? Third, you missed my point: If they do not understand a cone, I will explain a cone to them in English a ninth grader can understand. I didn’t choose ninth grade by accident, they are 15 year old kids with the basics behind them.
For every intellectual idea an adult understands, there is an historical path of a motivating problem, first, followed by an essential idea or insight that provided the tool that solved that problem. If an adult understands both the motivating problem and the solution that was found, it is pretty easy to recast those for a ninth grader and recapitulate the path. The invented words are not magic they are shorthand, an integral is a way of computing a volume (called an area in 2D). When it is not done analytically, it is often called Cubature, after the idea of cutting a 3D volume up into imaginary cubes and counting only those “below” a surface (or inside or whatever) as an estimate of the volume. The tinier the cubes, the more accurate the estimate.
In fact, the Archimedes problem, trying to compute the volume of the Crown, is a 3D integral problem. If you can explain that “Eureka” moment to a 15 year old, then you can explain integrals to them.
gbk::
”
Stephen Grossman,
“Yes, liberals dont limit sacrifice. Conservatives limit sacrifice w/God, claiming that Heaven is the reward (or 78 virgins if youre Muslim).”
What utter bullshit.”
Why is it utter bullshit? Putting aside the fact that I think it is 72 virgins instead of 78. I guess the thought of all those virgins gave him a premature factualization.
gbk:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:VOLUME_OF_CONE_BY_INTEGRATION.pdf
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww_0v8wXC4A
areas of revolution. you can figure out the shape of a cone intersecting a sphere.
I hope this helps you.
yes integration is that and it is more. you can take a parabolic function, for example, and rotate it around an axis and create a 3 dimensional solid or shell.
Slarti could explain it much better than I can, he has a PhD in math and I havent used integration in years.
Stephen Grossman,
“Yes, liberals dont limit sacrifice. Conservatives limit sacrifice w/God, claiming that Heaven is the reward (or 78 virgins if youre Muslim).”
What utter bullshit.
Bron,
“How are you going to integrate a cone if you dont know what it is?”
And you’re a civil engineer? One doesn’t integrate cones, one observes the shapes dependent on the angle the cross section is executed at which leads to ellipses, circles, and other esoteric shapes.
Integration is the accumulation of infinite points be it time or other factors.
“you can teach young children Shakespeare but they havent had the emotional/life experience/vocabulary to understand much of it.”
Which is why they should read it, don’t you think?
Zombie
1, December 11, 2012 at 8:49 am
@Bron: The idea that liberals do not limit sacrifice is utter bullshit.
The Aynish seem incapable of thinking in anything other than black and white,
Lacking black and white, ie, absolute values, there is no way to limit sacrifice.
The worship of grey is compromise with destruction. Liberals have been attacking absolute moral values for many decades ,ie, they will compromise, ie, destroy, all values. Nazism and liberalism come from the same nihilist root in Kant’s split between morality and values. And now liberalism is compromising their one-worldism with nationalism in saying that financial sacrifice to the nation of the rich is their patriotic duty. After spitting on a rational American patriotism, based on individual rights, liberals are wrapping the flag around govt economic intervention. Weimer Germany again. Nazism is nationalist socialism, based on the rejection of reason shared with liberals.
Your scientific fraud of behaviorist materialism, with its evasion of self-consciousness as a method and object of the science of psychology, the self-consciousness that is the power of explicit reasoning, rests on the same irrationalism loudly advocated by Nazism.
> This “either or” thinking is how they arrive at the ludicrous notion that people are either 100% selfish or 100% selfless
Every value either furthers or threatens one’s life, a metaphysical fact about life. But man, w/free will, can and has chosen a vast variety of compromises between selfish life and selfless death. Eg, liberalism, for many decades acompromise between Marxism and capitalism.
tony c:
Stephen is right about the integrals and young children. How are you going to integrate a cone if you dont know what it is?
you can teach young children Shakespeare but they havent had the emotional/life experience/vocabulary to understand much of it.
I bet a parrot can also tell you how to do an integral.
Zombie
> I can explain five dimensional integrals to ninth graders in a way they can understand in words they already know
Romans started education with grammar split from reality, at first to teach political rhetoric and then ,later, to study language itself. Roman education rejected the Greek purpose of education, life, for duty. This was consistent with the growing religiousity of Rome, of the spirit over matter. There is no practical purpose of five dimensional integrals for young teens. They need arithmetic, geometry, algebra, etc. to measure the concrete reality which they know. They dont know enough about concrete reality to have any need for your rationalist nonsense. They cant logically reduce the abstractions to the concrete. Its a transcendental world that youre teaching. Youre a priest.
@Stephen: Completely ignored. You waste your time.
Zombie
>It is always inferred, by some genius that mentally invents it as the simplifying model that fits all the known data.
Astronomical observations were fit into floating, formal math, without induction of causes, until the concept-driven rise of modern science. Contemporary science, eg, string theory, big bang, alternate universes, is regressing to pre-Newtonian saving of the appearances with bloated Ptolemaic epicycles explaining nothing. Math is regressing to a rationalization of “beauty, “elegance,” etc., ie, the number mysticism of Plato and Pythagoras. Justice is seven. Its a method for evading concrete reality.
Otteray Scribe
1, December 10, 2012 at 3:45 pm
For a Randian to accuse somebody else of being a nihilist is laughable. Especially in the context that it is a “bad thing.” That word does not mean what you think it means, apparently.
If you feel bad, take a pill.
Tony, whenever I am in a discussion with a strict behaviorist, they always seem to explain all learning as a purely cognitive learning process. If you want to stump a behaviorist, ask them how a young person learns the concept of “Justice.” The list of similar abstract concepts is endless.
@Bron: I am not sure what you are asking.
Knowledge does not only originate in experience, unless you count reason and inference within your head as “experience.” I do not.
It may also depend on how you define “knowledge.” If you are presented with a new problem, and then invent a new surefire way to solve it, you know something that is not a result of experience.
There are many things we infer, and new relationships (in people or things) that we see that are not based on experience; I consider that “knowledge” gained without experience. Some things logically follow. Take for example the “knowledge” that the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun. At the time that is first “known” by a given culture (and has been independently known by several), it cannot possibly be based on some experience of seeing the solar system from on high. It is always inferred, by some genius that mentally invents it as the simplifying model that fits all the known data.
Of course knowing that data is a result of sensory experience, and I doubt a brain without any senses whatsoever develops any knowledge. So you will have to be more specific by what you mean for “experience” and “knowledge.”
“Its not critical to my recognition of his [Obama’s] nihilism, evidence for which is almost any day’s news.”
***************************************
For a Randian to accuse somebody else of being a nihilist is laughable. Especially in the context that it is a “bad thing.” That word does not mean what you think it means, apparently.
http://jemanzo.blogspot.com/2009/11/ethical-nihilism-of-ayn-rand.html
My neurons fire, therefore I am.
@Stephen: I’ll agree to your words if they symbolize Rand’s concepts.
No, I do not think I will play by your rules; you are demanding I learn your moon language in order to debate with you and I refuse to do that. I will debate Rand’s concepts when you translate them into plain English with common dictionary definition.
As I said before, redefining or adding to the definitions of existing words is evidence enough of fraud; it misleads those that understand the common meaning of the word. You are a fraud, Grossman, or the victim of a fraud, which is what Rand is. How do I know she was a fraud? By means you do not comprehend, apparently, inference and logic and the scientific training (and natural inclination) to question the accuracy of every line I read when somebody is making grand claims. She is a fraud; and the reinvention of language and inability to speak in plain English is a hallmark of that kind of fraud.
I can explain five dimensional integrals to ninth graders in a way they can understand in words they already know, I do not need to resort to jargon or definitions or word inventions to do that. I can do that because I am intelligent enough to translate, and I know the work inside out.
The fact that you cannot discuss Rand without using Rand’s reinvented language is all the evidence I need to know you do not really understand it, and all you can do is spout her writing. Which means it is pointless to argue with you because you have no independent judgment, all you have is a list of responses, insults, and a memorization of Aynish dogma. That’s it; you are no different than a religious zealot quoting the Bible at every turn. Different books, same rote mindset of letting somebody else (Ayn Rand) do your thinking for you.